‘Fountain of Youth’ Movie Review
AppleTV+ makes a tropey callback to the treasure hunting genre of twenty years ago with their latest original movie ‘Fountain of Youth’.
Archeologist Luke Purdue (John Krasinski) is a treasure-hunting adventurer, who has a talent for finding and acquiring rare art and artifacts. When he’s hired by terminally ill billionaire Owen Carver (Domnhall Gleeson) to find the legendary Fountain of Youth, he enlists the help of his sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman), a museum curator, as they go on a hunt around the world, looking for clues to the Fountain, all while powerful forces try and prevent them from finding it.
Watching ‘Fountain of Youth’ can give you the feeling you’ve been transported back to the 2000s when movies like this were all the rage. Dan Brown novels were selling like crazy and films like ‘National Treasure’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’ were big hits. This film is quite happy to accept all the tropes they provided: there are ancient clues hidden in paintings, secret discoveries in historical artifacts, and ancient societies out to stop the heroes, all with some improbable tech skills thrown in for good measure.
It’s all stuff that’s been shown before, and unlike the Dan Brown adaptations, none of it’s developed to any great extent. Plot points are dropped in as needed and then quickly discarded once they get in the way, and there’s no great intricacy to any of the riddles or clues to have you amazed at the reveals and really have to think to keep up with the story.
In fact, don’t think about it at all. The more you do the less it makes sense, and the plot has all the integrity of a two-thousand year-old mummy. There are so many moments where you go “wait a minute”, but it doesn’t matter, because now we’ve shifted to a new location, probably a new country, or one of the improbable action scenes has entered the screen at 200MPH.
The real star of the picture, in every sense, is John Krasinski as the main character Luke Purdue, a sort of mashup of Indians Jones, Ben Gates from ‘National Treasure’ and Nathan Drake from the Uncharted games. No matter what he’s doing he’s just a delight to watch, incredibly charismatic, smart, funny, but not perfect, and seems to be enjoying himself despite this being a streaming movie.
The rest of the cast is largely there to fill time, despite names like Natalie Portman and Stanley Tucci, and many of the characters do absolutely nothing and could have been ruthlessly cut or amalgamated into one, as there are far too many redundant plot threads surrounding them that aren’t needed.
It’s very much a by-the-numbers movie that borrows from its predecessors to give us things we’ve seen before. The revelation of who the bad guy is and what his motives are is just painful and can be seen coming a mile off. There’s no way you could call this a good movie, but it was still a fun one. It doesn’t take itself seriously or believe it’s telling some great story, but at the same time it’s not filled with the usual MCU mets humor and self-reference that’s become so common. In fact, it felt like a movie that might have been made twenty or more years ago, a movie that’s really encumbered with anything other than an intention to be entertainment, and it is. It’s no ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, but it’s an enjoyable treasure-hunting escape.
