FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH - Mark Reviews Movies

Fountain of Youth, Apple Original Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 23, 2025

Trying to be an old-fashioned adventure tale, Fountain of Youth features a couple of neat sequences of treasure hunting. Those aren't nearly enough, of course, to make up for the fact that James Vanderbilt's screenplay never establishes a firm sense of its overloaded cast of characters and often feels as if it's spinning its wheels in between the movie's major setpieces.

We can understand the second part. After all, the plot, like so many other movies—both much better and somewhat worse—that follow this tried-and-true formula, amounts to a lot of hunting for clues, attempting to piece together some sort of historical puzzle, and traveling from one locale to the next in order to repeat the process again and again. The riddles of Vanderbilt's script revolve around art history, a misprint in an important religious text, and, because none of these more modern examples of the genre can escape their most obvious inspiration, archeology.

Those clues take semi-estranged sibling treasure-hunters Luke (John Krasinski) and Charlotte Purdue (Natalie Portman) to all sorts of familiar sites, from an art museum in London, to a grand library in Vienna, and to the Great Pyramid of Giza. The most unique stop, however, is to the middle of the North Atlantic, in search of a sunken ocean liner from World War I. It's the most effective sequence in the whole movie, because of the novel logistics of the team's efforts to investigate the wreckage and the notion that even an event from just over 100 years ago could technically serve as the subject of an archeological expedition. Who needs ancient ruins in one of these movies, really, when there are so many modern ones worth exploring?

To go through the steps of this historical puzzle would be as taxing as it sometimes feels in the story. For a moment, though, let's instead focus on these characters, who should drive that quest with some kind of personality, motive, or, even on a fundamental level, sense of adventurous passion that makes us care about the whole process.

That's where the movie, directed by Guy Ritchie, comes up decidedly short. There's very little to the siblings at the center of the tale. Luke is passionate about the hunt and less, perhaps, about history. As played by Krasinski, the character is a bit sarcastic, is a bit oblivious to how self-involved he is, and has a bad habit of flirting with a beautiful woman whose own goals run counter to his and might want to kill him. He's less a character and more the archetype of any modern adventurer since the guy with the whip and the fedora became a household name. Krasinski might be a bit too jokey and casual in his manner to pull off that trick successfully.

There is something to him, at least, which is more than can be said of his younger sister. She's an art expert, brought into Luke's latest hunt—for the Fountain of Youth, natch—after he realizes a significant clue to the supposed location of the mythical place might be found on the back of some famous paintings. Charlotte is hesitant to join, because she has moved on to a "safe" and "comfortable" life as a museum curator after decades of treasure-hunting with her brother and late father. With her marriage ending and custody of her son proceeding in a legal battle, she begrudgingly joins Luke's crew. The brother doesn't leave her much choice, either, after he steals a painting from her museum right in front of her.

The rest of the cast is, well, simply too much for the routine plotting to handle, since it includes members of Luke's team (played by Laz Alonso and Carmen Ejogo) who just stand around while the siblings do the work, Charlotte's conveniently music-inclined son Thomas (Benjamin Chivers), and the inordinately wealthy Owen (Domhnall Gleeson), who's dying of cancer and put Luke on the trail of the legendary fountain in the hopes it can save his life. There are also plenty of people standing in the team's way, notably Esme (Eiza González), who's part of a group of the fountain's protectors, and Interpol detective Jamal (Arian Moayed), who has been on to Luke for a while. A climactic standoff adds a third party of foes, just to make things suddenly more convoluted than they already have been.

All of these characters are too clichéd, too dull, or too overshadowed by the business at hand to make much of an impression. That puts the weight of the movie's success almost entirely on the big puzzle at the heart of the story and the assorted action/adventure sequences within it. A chase through London and a fight in that library are pretty standard, and while the final stretch of advanced engineering in an ancient site is also to be expected, it's staged well enough, even if its attempt at a some emotional catharsis falls flat.

It does have that sequence at sea, though, as the team raises a shipwreck and has to fight adversaries as the whole thing sinks again. That's an imaginative respite from the rest of Fountain of Youth, which becomes bogged down by its large cast of bland characters and its overall sense of familiarity.

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