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 start 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 and narrowly escapes a gang of criminals, including the shadowy Esme (Eiza González). We are explicitly told (not shown) that Luke and Esme have sexual chemistry. Luke turns up in London to rope his estranged sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman), a museum curator in the middle of a messy divorce, into a globe-trotting puzzle quest connected to their father’s lost research. Their quest is backed by Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), a tech billionaire with terminal cancer funding the hunt for the Fountain of Youth, and tailed by Interpol agent named Abbas (Arian Moayed), setting up intertwining and surprisingly legible duel threats of the police and dangerous criminals 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 White Lotus 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 emerged 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). 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 weakest scenes are the shootouts, which are too noisy and clipped compared to the rest of the action.
The plotting of Fountain of Youth doesn’t deviate from the line of dominoes you’d expect — a famous location, some brief exposition, a new puzzle to solve, then an action set piece, rinse, repeat — but it’s solidly entertaining within that formula. There’s more variety in the setpieces than I anticipated: a tense underwater brawl, a stay-quiet heist of a grand library, and a Last Crusade-style series of puzzles 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 not being a literal pool of water — gets set aside in favor of hewing as closely to Raiders as possible.
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 is harmless and fun. It leans on only a couple of tropes too often (the “precocious kid solves riddle while grown-ups bicker” beat; the “Luke pretends to surrender but punches someone at the last second” maneuever), 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 fine.
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.