TL;DR – Dull.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I paid for the AppleTV+ service that viewed this film.

Fountain of Youth Review –

There is a genre in the Action-Adventure that leans into hunting lost artefacts, which, of course, makes you think of Indiana Jones and National Treasure or more. I honestly love these films because they capture that childlike wonder when I was discovering the world and learning about history. So, when I heard that Guy Richie was going to take a stab at a film in this world with a fantastic cast, I was fundamentally excited to give it a watch. I probably should have reset my expectations.

So, to set the scene, we open in the streets of Bangkok as Luke Purdue (John Krasinski) needs to outmanoeuvre a local gang to escape with a painting. As he takes an emergency train ride to Chiang Mai and tries to get some rest, he is woken up by a business opportunity. Esme (Eiza González) gives Luke the ‘opportunity’ to go easily or difficultly. A fight/flirt on the train proceeds. Luke escapes and now has a mission in his life. He is going to need a team to pull it off: Murf (Laz Alonso), Deb (Carmen Ejogo), Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), and his sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman), which he may or may not have just gotten into a lot of trouble with her boss, ex-husband, oh and also INTERPOL.    

Okay, I am going to be quite harsh with this film because the level of skill and talent here deserved a better outcome. However, that is not to say that there were no areas of merit here. I have to give credit to the Thai stunt team because the opening fight sequences around Bangkok were the best in the film by a long mile. They were fun and made the most of the area they were filming in. I liked the role that Benjamin Chivers had as Thomas, and his conversation with Domhnall Gleeson was the most interesting one in the film by far. Also, from a production perspective, I like the work that they did with musical harmonics and sand.

However, that is honestly where the good times end, and at most, what we are left with is a historically confused, dull mess. One area in which the film stumbles is the dialogue, which feels like it was forced out of the actors under duress. It was my understanding that John Krasinski was meant to be charismatic because his banter is as flat here as the Nullarbor Plain. There is a line in the script that literally goes: “Sniff, sniff. Something smells good. That is the exotic aroma of danger”, and it is meant to come off as charming, but instead, it landed like you needed to get your mace out of your bag and spray. None of the cast felt like they were having a good time. I am not sure why Laz Alonso and Carmen Ejogo were there given how little they are provided to do, and when the movie does try to have some cogent argumentation on the merits of the scene’s stimulus, it comes off as a word salad of pretentiousness. Oh, and Stanley Tucci is here providing nothing but reminding us that if you have not watched Conclave, you should watch Conclave.   

Now, had the film been fun, you probably could have overlooked a lot of this, but because it was dull, you start to see past the dialogue to all the inconsistencies and historical failures that permeate the work. To begin with, they have this whole dialogue about how they are not “grave robbers”, which they are, but worst still, they are culturally and historically destructive grave robbers. They desecrate a naval memorial in the RMS Lusitania, cause extensive and irreversible damage to the vessel, break into a watertight safe and then let all the other contents get destroyed as the ship crushes around them. And these were the guys we were meant to be rooting for. Seriously, even if nothing else happened in the film, and it does, they all should be jailed for this.

Much of their rationale for the movie makes no sense once you have even a cursory think about the setup. For example, how all of these famous artists, possibly only two of whom ever met each other, put a code in their paintings to look at a Bible in a vastly different country that was made after one of them was already well dead. It is like they pulled up a wall of things that happened in the 1600s and threw darts while blindfolded and just went with it. Then we get the Pyramid site that is filled with Corinthian columns, Greek-ish text, and an Indian-style stepwell. Once again, if this were fun or anyway interesting, you would not be noticing these things. Still, every moment that is not filled with flaccid dialogue is instead hitting every banal trope in this genre like they fell out of a tree and hit every branch on the way down. But more than anything, this was meant to be a Guy Ritchie film, and there is nothing here that would tell me that bar a name in the credits. For a filmmaker with such distinct flares to his creative process, seeing a bland outing is a bit depressing.             

In the end, do we recommend Fountain of Youth? Look, I want to say no right away. But to be fair, it is not fundamentally flawed; it just lacks substance. For example, if you went to a full breakfast buffet and could choose from options around the world, you went with plain porridge from the microwave. Have you watched Fountain of Youth? Let us know what you thought in the comments below. If you liked Fountain of Youth, we would recommend to you Red Notice.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Fountain of Youth
Directed by – Guy Ritchie
Written by – James Vanderbilt
Music by – Christopher Benstead
Cinematography by – Ed Wild
Edited by – James Herbert
Production/Distribution Companies – Skydance, Vinson Films, Project X Entertainment, A Toff Guys Films & Apple TV+
Starring – John Krasinski, Natalie Portman, Eiza González, Domhnall Gleeson, Arian Moayed, Laz Alonso, Carmen Ejogo, Benjamin Chivers, Stanley Tucci, Michael Epp, Steve Tran & Daniel de Bourg
Rating  – Australia: M;