Throughout Guy Ritchie’s Indiana Jones knockoff movie Fountain of Youth, characters repeatedly argue that the joy of adventure is more valuable than whatever prize they’re seeking. The “journey over destination” ethos isn’t a bad one if it offers surprises and opportunities for growth along the way, but this movie just aimlessly wanders toward a dull, predictable ending.
Fountain of Youth actually starts off strong, with adventurer and art thief Luke Purdue (The Office star and A Quiet Place mastermind John Krasinski) in a zany Ong-Bak-style chase through the streets of Bangkok. As he tries to escape a gang he stole a painting from, he winds up driving a motorcycle through a market and stealing a food truck. That’s quickly followed by an equally frenetic close-quarters fight scene in the dining car of a train that involves clever use of a ladle to buy time.
Krasinski’s extensive experience at playing snarky and smug fits very well with Ritchie’s love of fast-talking protagonists, seen from his earliest movies — Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels — to his spin on Sherlock Holmes starring Robert Downey Jr. Krasinski feels especially at home in Ritchie’s wheelhouse during the early scenes, where he explains the meaning of “ambiguous” while surrounded by angry gangsters, or engages in some flirtatious sparring with Esme (Ash and 3 Body Problem star Eiza González), the leader of a mysterious group that’s chasing the same clues about the Fountain’s location that he’s also gathering.
The fun quickly dries up, as the action gives way to a slew of dull exposition and bland characters. Hired to find the Fountain of Youth by billionaire Owen Carver (Ex Machina’s Domhnall Gleeson), Luke seeks the help of his estranged sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman), trying to rekindle her love of the globe-trotting adventures the family shared before their father died. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 2018’s Tomb Raider, and The Venture Bros. all did a far better job at exploring the challenges of bringing your family along to pursue ancient, maybe-magical relics than this script. Zodiac and The Amazing Spider-Man screenwriter James Vanderbilt doesn’t show an ounce of sympathy for Charlotte’s decision to settle down to raise a kid and become a museum curator, siding entirely with Luke’s assessment that he is cool and right about everything, and his sister is boring and wasting her life.
While Krasinski has great chemistry with González, Luke’s sibling banter with Charlotte falls entirely flat. Vanderbilt doesn’t even try to come up with credible reasons for Charlotte to join the quest, instead repeatedly using Gilligan Cuts to just show that she’s still at Luke’s side on the next phase of the journey. Charlotte’s young son Thomas (The Devil’s Hour’s Benjamin Chivers) tags along mostly to reiterate how lame his mom is, but at least gets a surprisingly compelling scene grilling Owen about his wealth and motivations. Charlotte occasionally hints that she knew things about their dad that Luke didn’t, particularly in relation to a golden mask that haunts Luke’s dreams. But there’s no real payoff to that plot, or explanation of what their adventures meant to her.
That backstory could have been fleshed out a bit by the members of her dad’s old crew, who Luke teams up with — inexplicably, they’re just a few years older than the Purdue siblings, rather than from their father’s generation. But Patrick Murphy (Laz Alonso) and Deb McCall (Carmen Ejogo) just feel like a hollow attempt to replicate Ethan Hunt’s support team in the Mission: Impossible movies, providing functional help without any real motivations or personalities of their own.
Instead, the script just delivers exposition dumps straight out of a Dan Brown story, about an alliance of famous artists hiding clues to the Fountain of Youth’s location in their masterpieces, and a secret society sworn to make sure its power remains hidden. Because Ritchie loves fight scenes with as many factions trying to kill each other as possible, Luke’s team is also pursued by multiple other groups who are upset about everything his team stole to solve the puzzle.
Some fun sequences make clever use of the environment, like a playful skirmish between Luke and Esme in the Austrian National Library. But a mission to find a clue on the back of the Rembrandt painting the businessman Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt Sr. — the screenwriter’s great-grandfather — brought on the Lusitania and conveniently stored in a waterproof safe is highly self-indulgent, and just another example of Charlotte being a useless buzzkill. Rather than feeling stylish or clever, signature Ritchie touches like a slow-motion fight scene and a flashback explaining part of the climax only add to the film’s clunkiness. He could have easily cut 30 minutes of repetitive foreshadowing and building suspense for an ending that turns out to be blatantly stolen from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
If Fountain of Youth kept up the simple fun of its first few scenes, it could have been a solid tribute to the adventure genre. But Vanderbilt and Ritchie’s attempt to find some profound meaning in the search for lost treasure never really works, because their characters are too thin to make their emotional catharsis meaningful. There is nothing at the end of this journey worth the time spent getting there.
Fountain of Youth releases on Apple TV Plus on May 23.
