Action

Fountain of Youth

I’m not getting any younger here.

I think Guy Ritchie’s new movie “Fountain of Youth” has been reading too many Dan Brown novels and watching his movies (particularly “The Da Vinci Code”), “National Treasure,” “Red Notice,” and the “Indiana Jones” movies on repeat. It reads too many treasure books and watches too many adventure movies of the genre. And therefore, we have so many cliches and predictable plot elements.

This is already a hit on AppleTV+, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good movie. In fact, it’s too exhausting to be a rousing adventure film. And it has a great cast, who can do better than succumb to the formulas the movie throws at them.

John Krasinski plays an art thief named Luke Purdue and Natalie Portman plays his estranged art museum curator sister Charlotte. Siblings that are an art thief and an art museum curator? That wouldn’t look good towards higher authority, especially since she is caught in a custody battle regarding her son Thomas (Benjamin Chivers).

They both reunite when he and his team (Domhnall Gleeson as the allegedly dying rich guy, Laz Alonso as the tech guy, and Carmen Ejogo as the comic relief) may have located the scared Fountain of Youth. They must travel to different countries and solve various puzzles in order to find it. But Luke also has a rival named Esme (Eiza Gonzalez), who tries to keep him from it, and an Interpol officer (Arian Moayed), who tries and fails to arrest him and his team.

“Fountain of Youth” was also written by James Vanderbilt, whose writing credits include the latest “Scream” movies, “Truth,” “Zodiac,” and “Murder Mystery.” Could there be a potential romance between Luke and Esme in a love-hate relationship? Could the sister always be criticizing her brother for his thieving ways? And could there be a wolf in sheep’s clothing in Luke’s team? I think I can say “Yes” to all three of them, and I’m not surprised.

As I’m watching this movie, I’m impressed by some of the production designs. There’s a scene when Luke and his team are able to lift the first class section of the sunken ship the RMS Lusitania for a limited time. It sounds stupid, but at least the moist and rusty appearance make it look like a treasure hunting film. And I also appreciate the inside of the Great Pyramid of Giza, which holds the most obvious answers for the story. At least these structures are better looking than what the script provides.

I can’t tell if Krasinski is talking as himself or like Zachery Levi, but either way, he seems like the better half of the two siblings, while Portman keeps making the same disapproving features with him and ends up being annoying. And she’s a great actress, no doubt, especially since her last movie was “May December.” And Gonzalez, who last worked with Ritchie on “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” is underwritten and underdeveloped, and the movie barely has time to give her chemistry with Krasinski’s character. They would have been the better pair.

Ritchie’s last two films were “The Covenant” and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” which were both entertaining and open-minded. And while “Fountain of Youth” isn’t his worst movie (remember that would be his remake of “Swept Away”), it’s still one of his weakest. And I would prefer if you see “Mission: Impossible-The Final Reckoning” in a movie theater. At least the exhilarating, but long actions sequences didn’t have arguments and cliches.

Or maybe I was reading the map wrong.

Rating: 1.5 out of 4.

Now Streaming on AppleTV+

Categories: Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Mystery

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