Fountain of Youth movie review: raiders of the lost art

Just like that amazing concrete from ancient Rome that we are not able to replicate today, we have lost the ability to buckle swash like Hollywood of yore could. We simply don’t know how to do it anymore. We get the occasional nod to it that kinda sorta works, like, shockingly, Disney’s Jungle Cruise, from just four years ago. Though you have to squint hard to see it even there.

Ya have to go back to before the turn of the millennium — which seems like yesterday to me, but there are people working in the second Trump administration who weren’t even alive then, and who might consider this a movie too “old” to be of interest — to get the last great attempt that you can embrace without hesitation: 1999’s The Mummy. Which kicked off a cycle of imitation and repetition that included 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and 2004’s National Treasure and 2006’s The Da Vinci Code, all modest to solid box-office successes but also all less than successful as even merely pulp entertainment. None are truly memorable. None approach iconic.

And now, alas, the generational cycle begins anew with Fountain of Youth, which so desperately wants to invoke Indiana Jones that it shamelessly steals multiple elements from what is arguably the best Indy movie, 1989’s The Last Crusade. If we discovered that screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Independence Day: Resurgence, Truth) had merely fed Crusade’s script into a large language model, the bullshit plagiarism chatbots we’re calling “AI” at the moment, and asked it to spit out an imitation, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

The plot is a rote treasure hunt across art galleries and hallowed libraries and sunken shipwrecks and ancient monuments and all the usual hackneyed intrepid locations to gather clues meant to lead to the titular legendary sanctum, which director Guy Ritchie, phoning it in, depicts with all the intellectual stimulation of a quiz on a breakfast-cereal box. And fuck him for turning what should be a truly brainy-nerdy endeavor into something that feels like it was honed by corporate focus groups and cinematic SEO. Ritchie (The Gentlemen, Aladdin) is only a year older than me, so I’m guessing he was in pretty much the same place as I was to get a geeky bookish buzz out of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981. There’s no hint of sexy-librarian (so to speak) Indy here, and only the slimmest, most cartoonish trappings of the bullwhip-wielding daredevil.

Leading the tedious quest is Luke Purdue (John Krasinski: IF, Free Guy), professional wiseass adventurer; anything can be a job if you want it enough, I guess, and how great would it have been if this movie could have sold us on this as a life choice? He ropes in his stick-up-her-butt museum-curator sister, Charlotte (Natalie Portman: Avengers: Endgame, Jane Got a Gun), because Dad would have wanted it, or something. They haven’t seen each other in years but invoking their father, who is not a character here at all, in the most generic sense is enough to get her on board. Because that’s what the LLM took regarding obsessive academic fathers from The Last Crusade, apparently.

Oh, and Charlotte is bringing her grade-school son (Benjamin Chivers) along on their adventure, which even before she made this decision was shown to be a venture incredibly dangerous, like on a life-and-death, you-will-get-shot-or-killed-in-a-car-crash level. Because the script for The Mummy, which also featured a cute kid, was also fed into the LLM, it would seem.

Fountain of Youth is so, so desperate to thrill us, and fails so, so terribly. It’s not only charmless and humorless — every attempt to be wryly amusing quickly descends into the cringeworthy — but it’s also ultimately nonsensical, even on the fantasy level that we are already eager to buy into (or we wouldn’t be here in the first place). Luke keeps having dreamlike visions of the horrors, or something?, that discovering the supposedly deeply dangerous(?) Fountain of Youth will bring, but we never understand what he’s seeing or how these visions are meant to come about, or why. When we finally get to the Fountain — because of course we do — further dangers on a civilizational scale are threatened but never cohere. We genuinely never have any idea what is at stake, for either the characters or the world at large.

The dialogue — again, it’s not difficult to imagine that it was written by an LLM — is often tortured, mortifying, or both: “Don’t tell me your primal curiosity is not piqued by the great mysteries” is one anti-banger, part of how Luke somehow convinces Charlotte to join the quest. The cast is wasted: Portman looks utterly miserable throughout, naturally. Domhnall Gleeson (Peter Rabbit 2, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) as the billionaire financing the mission somehow manages to be vanilla. There is zero chemistry between Eiza González’s (Ambulance, Godzilla vs. Kong) mysterious woman trying to thwart the quest, and Luke, despite the movie’s insistence that they are sizzling. Arian Moayed’s (Rock the Kasbah, Rosewater) Interpol cop, yet another antagonist, needn’t be here at all, and in fact it would have been better for the actor if he were not present. Stanley Tucci (The Silence, A Private War) in a one-scene cameo reeks of “brother-in-law Krasinski called in a favor.”

(Was there also perhaps an element of marital oneupsmanship behind this movie in the form in which we got it? Cuz Krasinski is married to Emily Blunt, who starred in Jungle Cruise… could a bit of kitchen-table negging have prompted him to accept a role he’s not really suited for? A conversation over breakfast along the lines of “There’s nothing wrong, honey, with the fact that I, your wife, have managed to be a bit more Indiana Jones onscreen than you. It’s absolutely fine…”? If so, that would actually be the most interesting thing about Fountain of Youth.)

Worst of all, a sequel, perhaps even a series of films, is threatened in the end. Haven’t we suffered enough?

more films like this:
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Disney+ US | Netflix UK]
• Jungle Cruise [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Disney+]