As the warm weather starts to roll in across the Northern Hemisphere, are you ready for a fun, lighthearted adventure? Well, I was too, but then I watched Apple TV+’s new big budget action-adventure movie Fountain of Youth. I remember when Guy Ritchie’s name on a film meant something—Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels were two formative movies for me, his recent war movie The Covenant felt like a turning point from big budget fluffy movies like Sherlock Holmes to serious filmmaking with impactful stories and great acting, even the humorless crime thriller Wrath of Man showed that he was capable of more serious storytelling. But with Fountain of Youth, Guy Ritchie returns to the meaningless, nonsensical movies that have defined the last 20 years of his filmography.
So let’s get into it. The movie opens on John Krasinski (The Office, A Quiet Place), playing Luke Purdue, on a scooter driving through the streets of Bangkok as a cover of “Bang Bang” plays (I didn’t recognize the language, but considering this scene is set in Thailand, Thai is probably a safe bet) with a painting tube on his back. Cue the very polite henchmen/gangsters who roll up, threaten Luke, and then start shooting as a car and scooter chase ensues. He escapes rather clumsily—which is honestly refreshing to see. So many times we’re used to seeing protagonists be essentially superhuman even when they’re not playing superhumans, but here, Luke takes a tumble and actually has to limp away and is affected by it. Unfortunately, that’s about the last good thing I have to say about the movie.
With plans A, B, and C pretty much all blown, Luke gets on the earpiece to talk to his support, who directs him to a train. On the train, he falls asleep and we get the first of many intercalary chapters where he dreams of finding something far off, but with serious consequences. Once he wakes up from this bit of foreshadowing, he’s confronted by Esme, played by Eiza Gonzales (Baby Driver, 3 Body Problem), who describes herself as the “hand of mercy” and her associates as the “hand of judgment” before demanding the painting that Luke has. He immediately starts flirting with the amount of charm and charisma that should make anyone feel more confident in their own flirting skills, because it sounded like being hit on by a cardboard box. Esme’s not going for any of it, and then, well, there’s another fight and another escape. It’s all meant to be very funny and very exciting and almost none of it works. In fact, that’s kind of how much of the movie goes. It’s trying very hard to be funny and exciting and more often than not, it fails. It’s one of those times where you’re aware that they’re making a joke or trying to make to you laugh in some way and it just pretty much never lands, save for one legitimately funny scene that probably would have worked better as a YouTube Short than a movie.
After his escape, Luke goes to the museum where his sister Charlotte, played by Natalie Portman (V for Vendetta, Black Swan), works and pulls off the most incredible art heist I’ve ever seen. And by incredible, I mean in the literal sense of the word, because it lacks any credibility as a scene. Luke distracts Charlotte, walks up to a painting, lifts it off the wall, and then jogs out to a perfectly parked AC Cobra because apparently in this museum all the security guards take their coffee break at the same time, convinces her to get in with him and they go through a fairly leisurely car chase where you never believe anyone is in actual danger and nothing feels exciting despite the fact the AC/Shelby Cobra is one of the most stunning cars of all time and it’s always a treat to see one in action (even one that is most definitely a number of different replicas). Eventually, he reveals that he’s working with his father’s old team, played by Laz Alonso (The Boys) and Carmen Ejogo (True Detective, Selma). I didn’t bother learning their characters’ names or looking them up for you because despite the fact that Alonso and Ejogo are both talented actors, they’re essentially set dressing and diversity checklist casting in the film, their characters each amounting to roughly half of a “man in the chair” archetype. They then reveal that their quest for the Fountain of Youth is being bankrolled by dying billionaire Owen Carver, played by the usually excellent Domhnall Gleeson (Ex Machina, Brooklyn). Yeah, shady billionaire funding, what could go wrong that they couldn’t painfully telegraph?
There are a lot of problems with this movie and most of it has to do with how it’s written, directed, and acted. I know this is a talented cast. Even Stanley Tucci (Conclave, Big Night) shows up, and between this and Electric State, it makes me wonder just how many vacation homes he’s paying off with these movies. The scenes are written like a video game, specifically an Uncharted game. As soon as our “heroes” get to their next objective and solve the puzzles to reach their goal the right way, the “bad guys” burst through the door or wall and start shooting. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Uncharted games, they’re some of my favorite games I’ve ever played, but a movie has to have a narrative structure and not an objective based structure. Movies aren’t the same as games, as evidenced by the fact that I couldn’t get through 15 minutes of the Uncharted movie before shutting it off. It’s very unsatisfying to watch your main characters go through a bunch of disjointed fetch quests—it’s not that it can’t be done, but Fountain of Youth isn’t pulling it off. More than that, there are nonsensical decisions abound here, relating to Charlotte’s shoehorned custody battle for her only son because of course the best way to not only demonstrate that you’re the more responsible parent, but also keep your child safe is to take them with you on a globetrotting graverobbing tour where not just one, but two shadowy organizations are trying to gun you down and so is Interpol. Nothing like dodging a hail of bullets at every turn to earn your “World’s Best Mom” mug the right way and not just get it from the Hallmark store like everyone else.
It’s also incredibly unoriginal. Like Electric State, I walked away with the sense that the overall feeling in the writers’ room is that if they copy enough movies, it’ll feel like an original film, and it just doesn’t. Like I said before, the similarities to Uncharted were impossible to miss, but everything from Luke’s Indiana Jones wardrobe and their dead father being named Harrison as an homage—if that’s the right word when dealing with a piece of media as bad as this—to Harrison Ford, to Luke’s charmless Star-Lord energy that made him incredibly annoying instead of endearing. And there’s a whiff of The Da Vinci Code, which is either a piece of memetic pulp fiction or a very bad movie, depending on whether you read it or watched it. The whole movie felt familiar in a bad way, the way a store brand soda kind of tastes like a Coke or Pepsi, but not quite and in a way that you can’t put your finger on, but is off-putting. The knowledge they have feels unearned—unlike something like Uncharted or Indiana Jones, where the characters draw on a deep well of knowledge and ingenuity gained from years and years of study and experience, everything here is at their fingertips. It’s all too easy. The extensive use of technology to find the answers to their problems make them feel more like an IT department than a group of archaeologists or specialists with arcane knowledge of the past. Every time they figure something out, it’s because a computer program did it, not because they knew or deduced something.
I wish that was where the problems with this movie ends, but it goes far deeper than that. It shows off some of the most Eurocentric thinking I’ve seen in a modern movie. In practically the same breath, Luke, when convincing Charlotte that there’s enough truth in the myth of the Fountain to warrant trying to find it, he states that dozens of cultures over centuries all have the same myth, but then goes on to say that the path to the Fountain is hidden in six paintings of Jesus Christ. That’s right, it goes from every culture to the only one that matters in the eyes of this movie, white European Christianity; even a special Bible is part of the path. Now, I understand that European art is something people learn about in school and a name like Rembrandt is one that people will recognize moreso than artists like Katsushika Hokusai or Amrita Sher-Gil, but if you’re putting together a continent-spanning adventure taking you from places like Thailand to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, you can do a little more research than just grabbing the names you remember from your grade school history textbook and Googling what paintings of Christ they did. So while every culture has the Fountain of Youth myth, it’s the white Christian ones that count. Although they’re happy to plunder other cultures to get to the Fountain, those cultures are not the ones that have any clues or knowledge that helps them find the Fountain itself. It’s just these six paintings of Jesus that hold the truth. Now, I hesitate to call this racist, because I don’t think it is, not at its core or intentionally; but it is incredibly lazy writing. Just like all the writing in Fountain of Youth is incredibly lazy. How does Eiza Gonzalez and her crew of faceless red shirts keep showing up just after Luke and Charlotte? And then how does Interpol keep showing up just after they do? How are they being tracked? How are they finding them? If Luke and his team are the only ones with the clues, how does everyone keep catching up to them 15 minutes after they break the cryptic codes that have sat in plain sight and gone unfound by everyone else for hundreds of years? What it comes right down to is that it doesn’t matter to the film how this is happening, it’s only concerned with the fact that it’s happening, whether or not it makes sense.
Another problem with the film is how much of the violence is sanitized in order to give it a family-friendly vibe. People die, they die violently, and none of that is ever mentioned. Sure, it’s pretty much always Interpol agents in tactical gear or Esme’s merry band of baddies, but not a single character ever mentions the human cost this quest is taking. Not even the Interpol inspector, Jamal Abbas, played by Arian Moayed (Succession) in charge of the investigation seems to notice or care that his team are the ones being killed. Nor are the possible effects of seeing this violence and being the target of it as well on a 12 year old child ever explored. The aim of this is likely to keep violence from bothering people who would be watching this with their children—the PG-13 rating and inclusion of a child character really show that it’s written with family viewership in mind—but the effects of it are to make Luke, Charlotte, and their team seem incredibly callous to the loss of life. There is never a moment where anyone cares about anything that happens to anyone outside of their little circle; even Luke’s moments of introspection, those foreshadowing dreams, only exhibit fears about the possible consequences for his family, whom he had no qualms about putting in danger in the first place. People are dying and they’re right at the center of it and because they don’t care, they feel like highly unsympathetic characters and bad people. No amount of awkward flirting or Ryan Reynolds-style quips can endear someone to me if they don’t ever take a moment to reflect on the deaths happening around them. They appear to lack humanity, which for villains is a bit boring, but okay, but for protagonists, it’s unforgivable. It makes them all seem like awful people and by the end of it, I was waiting for one of these ancient spaces they were going in to collapse on them and put me out of my suffering by burying them all alive.
The movie also showcases the problem with adventure movies. I have a hard time looking back and trying to remember the last time we had a good one. And now that so much is mapped out by satellites and the answer to almost every question is available at our fingertips, it feels like mystery and adventure have disappeared from the world (although thanks to AI-powered search engines, we now have a little mystery restored, because you never know if they’re being truthful or not) and it would be really nice to see some convincing adventure in our films. Movies like National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code are B-movie schlock at best and calling Fountain of Youth that would be an insult to B-movie schlock. Even the Indiana Jones movies don’t feel as good to watch as they did in my youth, although The Mummy remains a largely fun Sunday afternoon film to watch. If we count the Jumanji reboot films and their virtual world, then they’re probably the last bit of adventure films that was enjoyable to watch. And in some ways, divorcing the the cultural plunder from the real world into a virtual one removes the icky feeling that comes with some of these movies and thinking just a little bit too long about how some exhibits got to the museums in which they now live. Maybe that is the way forward for adventure films. Ironically, as more of these movies begin to feel like video games, which themselves learned from movies to become more cinematic, it’s the ones about a video game world that feel more organic.
Sometimes movies are frustrating when you see the potential to be better go terribly unrealized, but unlike those movies, Fountain of Youth is frustrating because of how mind-numbing it is. This is the kind of movie I want to be made; not attached to a major IP, not part of a cinematic universe, something meant to be fun. But I want it to be made better. I mean, there’s so much wrong with this movie, I couldn’t even mention it all, like when they float the wreck of the RMS Lusitania to find a painting while continually insisting that they’re not graverobbers. I wanted to bring this movie to you because in the midst of the anxiety and fear gripping many in the world, a plucky adventure films that brings a smile to your face can be worth a hell of a lot. But this isn’t that film. I felt like my time was wasted; at 2 hours and 5 minutes, it’s not the longest movie, and it is action-packed, but it has nothing going on. The screen is always flashing something at you, but devoid of any meaning or any affection for the characters or any stakes, because no one ever feels like they’re ever in danger (with Luke even dismissing his sister being held hostage at gunpoint in a scene using slow-motion to play it for comedy that, surprise, surprise, also misses), it feels like nothing of any importance ever happens in the film. I’ve said before that I don’t give letter grades in this blog, but if I were to, this elementary grade level movie wouldn’t be passing on to middle school.
