Fountain of Youth — Guy Ritchie [Review]

Do you have two hours to kill and enjoy, say, breezy, brazenly derivative adventure movies? Well then, buckle up, because your prime weekend streaming content just dropped. Enter Fountain of Youth, the latest from the increasingly prolific Guy Ritchie, a fella who more and more seems to be able to take blatantly hack material and turn it into something perfectly enjoyable. Damning with faint praise? Sure, but this relatively tasty junk food is being dumped onto Apple TV+ on a holiday weekend, which is exactly where it belongs and exactly where it’ll do the most entertainment good.

Luke Purdue (John Krasinski, doing absolutely nothing to delineate from his usual on-screen persona) is introduced mid-scooter chase. He’s a globetrotting treasure hunter who ropes his in-the-middle-of-a-messy-divorce sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman, also basically playing to type) into his scheme to track down the legendary titular magical fountain. Along for the ride (and ostensibly funding this little jaunt) is Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), a billionaire dying of liver cancer looking for a chance at survival (pay no attention to the law of economy of actors). They’re also being pursued by Esme (Eiza González), who works for a shadowy network of assassins sworn to protect the fountain’s secrets, and Interpol’s Inspector Abbas (Arian Moayed). Okay, so yes, all of that is extremely familiar: the life-giving treasure from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; the bickering co-leads from The Mummy; the clues in antiquities and artifacts from The Da Vinci Code; the ancient booby traps from all of them; and so on so and on. Which means here, we’re relying on Ritchie’s toolkit to keep things moving.

And for the most part, that works. Ritchie is nothing if not a canny stylist, and the more divorced from any ambition higher than kicky thrills, the better his movies tend to be. At this point, he’s an old hand, and so there’s an earnestness to the film’s inevitably canned humor and a genuine delight in working through the formula. The early, much bouncier stages of the movie promise something a bit flashier and more elaborate than it all eventually amounts to, but Fountain of Youth still has a handful of legible (if not particularly inventive) set pieces that, when paired with a decent set of needle drops, help push things through the frequent stops for exposition. James Vanderbilt’s script even ropes his own great-grandfather — yes, he’s one of those Vanderbilts — into the plot, using his real-life death on the Lusitania as a story beat, but that leads to one of the better action chunks, set aboard a floating piece of wreckage raised from the depths. The handsome location work in Bangkok, London, Egypt, and other global locales is also quite welcome.

All that being said, one’s personal threshold for the alleged banter between Krasinski and Portman will also definitely play a factor in just how smoothly the film goes down for individual viewers — if you’re already ambivalent or skeptical of their particular charms, this won’t move the needle much. But even that being the case, there is just enough here and just enough absent to say that Ritchie remains capable of delivering easily digestible trifles, and the final result is a film that is monumentally… fine.

DIRECTOR: Guy Ritchie;  CAST: John Krasinski, Natalie Portman, Domhnall Gleeson, Eiza González;  DISTRIBUTOR: Apple TV+;  STREAMING: May 23;  RUNTIME: 2 hr. 5 min.