THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH is director Guy Ritchie’s, latest, an action/adventure tale starring John Krasinski and Natalie Portman, as a brother-sister duo hunting for the mythical Fountain of Youth. THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH is a globetrotting adventure yarn blends RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, NAME OF THE ROSE, and NATIONAL TREASURE with an art heist thriller. Yet, there is little thrilling here, as the characters, plot and tropes are all too familiar, while the talented stars are miscast in their roles.
Guy Ritchie is a director who burst on the scene with a pair of clever twisty crime thrillers, LOCK STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS and SNATCH, but mostly failed to live up to that early promise. With THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH, all that remains of that early promise is some clever editing, a couple of good chase sequences, and a few cinematic flourishes. The script, not by Ritchie, is a mishmash of other films in the adventure genre, and seems maybe aimed at a middle or grade school audience. The story in both overly familiar and preposterous – far-fetched doesn’t even cover it.
John Krasinski and Natalie Portman are talented actors but seem miscast here. John Krasinski is particularly miscast, as a roguish art thief in the vein of Harrison Ford. Krasinski does his best to make Luke Purdue into a charming rogue but it’s a hard sell. After a wild chase sequence in Thailand, with Krasinski’s art thief Luke pursued by Asian gangster types led by Kasem (Steve Tran), and also a mysterious female agent named Esme (Eiza González) working for someone else, his character jets off to Europe, where he drops in on his sister Charlotte (Portman), a curator at an art museum, to liven up her dull life by stealing some art.
It turns out the siblings’ father was an art historian/archaeologist who had a particular fascination with the myth of the Fountain of Youth. The siblings had a splendid art and history education and a father who instilled good values but they took differing paths – her to art history and museum work and him into international art theft.
Luke does his work with the help of a pair of assistants, Murph (Laz Alonso), who arranges logistics like transportation and other practical matters access to locked places, and Debbie McCall (Carmen Ejogo), who restores and cleans up the stolen art, as well as providing research. Luke’s team has been hired by a billionaire suffering from terminal cancer, Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson) to find that legendary Fountain of Youth, for obvious reasons.
While Krasinski seems miscast, Portman gets to do little more than look outraged or scared in this tale. Luke decides his sister’s life is too dull, and wants to recruit her to help with the quest for that Fountain of Youth. She’s having none of it, and actually has enough going on in her life right now, as she and her British husband Harold (Daniel de Bourg) are in the middle of a divorce, and squabbling over custody of their precocious son Thomas (Benjamin Chivers). Stealing a painting from the museum where she works, and then practically kidnapping her when she tries to stop him, does not encourage family feeling but it does insure she has to listen to his pitch.
Nonetheless, Charlotte ends up going along on this search for the Fountain of Youth, and thanks to Gleeson’s billionaire, who arranges for a job for her husband in Japan, even is forced to take her eleven-year-old son along on this world-spanning adventure. To reassure her, the billionaire brings on a security team, led by tough guy Praeger (Michael Epp).
With a brother and sister pair at the center of this adventure, the film needs to look elsewhere for a love interest for Krasinski’s charming rogue, and finds it in the mysterious, and beautiful, female agent Esme he met in Thailand. While Esme coolly tries to separate Krasinski’s character Luke from the tube with the rolled-up stolen painting, the two have a little cat-and-mouse flirtation. The mysterious agent, who we find works for the equally-mysterious Elder (Stanley Tucci), turns up time and again as the brother and sister go on their globe-trotting quest.
The worldwide search takes the brother, sister, and nephew, all over the place, to track down clues to the location of the mythical Fountain of Youth, still pursued by the Thai gangsters, the mystery woman agent, and now Interpol, in the form of an inspector named Jamal Abbas (Arian Moayed).
You would think they would end up in Florida at some point but, oddly, they never do. Along the way, the story does sprinkle in a few interesting historical tidbits, and offers up some puzzles and riddles to solve, as it skips around the world. The whole thing rattles along to a big visual effects-filled and big battle conclusion, as expected.
THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH debuts streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday, May 23, 2025.
RATING: 1.5 out of 4 stars
