Raiders of the lost streaming revenue
There’s a fine line between “soul-crushing slop” and “modestly enjoyable slop.” Love Hurts — brutal. Back in Action — harmless. The Electric State — horrifying. Fountain of Youth — watchable! I can’t say there’s a pattern or a rule, though clearly having a talented director helps. Maybe there’s a trick to making the formulaic and glossy tolerable, or maybe it just depends on my mood when I’m watching. Who can say?
Fountain of Youth is a shameless, beat-for-beat knockoff of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with a little Da Vinci Code mixed in for that glossy travelogue texture and an emphasis on Vatican-adjacent conspiracy. You’ve seen this movie before, probably many times, but there are worse ways to conceive of a movie than bowing at the altar of Indy. At least this version zips along at a steady clip.
We open in Thailand, where disgraced archaeologist Luke Purdue (John Krasinski) steals a painting. He’s the Indiana Jones, and the painting is the gold idol. He gets chased a gang of criminals trying to steal the same painting. This shadow cabal including the shadowy Esme (Eiza González). We are explicitly told (not shown) that Luke and Esme have sexual chemistry. Luke barely escapes, then turns up in London to rope into his art thivery his estranged sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman), a museum curator in the middle of a messy divorce. She very reluctantly agrees, and they kick off a globe-trotting puzzle quest connected to their father’s lost research. They are accompanied and funded by Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), a tech billionaire with terminal cancer funding the hunt for the Fountain of Youth. Every step of the way, they are tailed by an Interpol agent named Abbas (Arian Moayed), setting up intertwining and surprisingly legible dual threats of the police (Abbas) and a competing criminal (Esme) chasing our protagonists.
The biggest disappointment of Fountain of Youth is how much of a zero Krasinski is. I haven’t watched too much of him since The Office, but given how big of a star he’s become and how many of his post-NBC roles have tried to position him as an Action Guy, I’m surprised how little aura or charisma he brings to the table. He’s the stand-in for Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones framework, but you probably don’t need me to tell you how much of a downgrade that is. Maybe I just have the new White Lotus season on the brain, but I kept wondering how much better Fountain of Youth would be if Sam Rockwell were in the lead. Answer: A lot.
Guy Ritchie as director actually comes out looking okay here. I haven’t done a full Ritchie tour, but he’s carved a niche as a B-tier genre monger. Compared to his cohort of ‘90s breakout directors who broke out with talky crime films — Danny Boyle, Matthew Vaughn, the of course their forbear Quentin Tarantino — Ritchie has stuck closest to his original lane, cranking out mid-budget crime and action flicks. His biggest detours were the RDJ-starring Sherlock Holmes movies and the Aladdin remake (because who can say no to the Mouse’s money), but Ritchie-core is a well-defined concept. Fountain of Youth isn’t career-defining work, but it’s confident and well-paced, and he’s up for staging a competent tomb escape. The film’s weakest scenes are the shootouts, which are too noisy and choppy compared to the rest of the well-crafted action.
The plotting of Fountain of Youth doesn’t deviate from the line of dominoes you’d expect — a famous location, some exposition, a puzzle, a set piece, rinse, repeat — but it’s solidly entertaining within that formula. It offers more variety in the action set pieces than I anticipated: we get a tense underwater brawl, a stay-quiet heist of a grand library, and a Last Crusade-style gauntlet of challenges inside a tomb. It’s breathless if un-challenging fun. And without going too far into spoilers, the one big swing the movie sets up — that the titular Fountain maybe is not a literal pool of water, but some other object or concepts — gets set aside in favor of hewing as closely to Raiders as possible: literal relic melts faces.
The script never quite enters the territory of catastrophe, but it’s definitely got that vibe where you wonder if some of the dialogue got a few too many uncredited touch-ups and/or large learning model revisions. There’s an unmistakable air of AI-polish to some of the lines, especially Natalie Portman’s brainy deuteragonist, which occasionally wander into parody territory. “I would not dare be mendacious with an official dressed in that houndstooth,” is an actual line of dialogue uttered with a straight face.
At the risk of tipping fully into hater-mode on one end and slop apologia on the other, I’ll even go so far as to say I liked this more than Dial of Destiny. Some of that’s down to expectations and reverence: when you invoke one of cinema’s holiest franchises, you better bring something sacred, which Dial of Destiny decidely doesn’t. But Fountain of Youth, pitched as streaming fodder, is harmless and fun. It leans on only a couple of tropes too often (the “precocious kid solves riddle while grown-ups bicker” beat occurs 3 times; the “Luke pretends to surrender but punches someone at the last second” maneuver maybe 5+ times), but has solid globetrotting flavor. It’s not quite good, mind you. But I’d watch a sequel! Sometimes the cinematic fast food hits just right.
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.