Fountain of Youth is the kind of bad film we deserve. It’s flagrant nonsense, unbothered by how directly it borrows from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, or that its supposed expert archaeologists explain to each other, “in Latin, ‘v’ is ‘w’”, and have to google the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But it’s the Guy Ritchie brand of nonsense, at least – it has, like King Arthur: Legend of the Sword or (the admittedly far superior) Sherlock Holmes before it, a little zing to it. A sense of character. And, because Apple TV+ seems to have no concept of budgets, it’s also stretched across a slew of glitzy international locations, including a climactic shootout at the base of the Pyramids of Giza.
This is a film that’s fun to complain about. We first meet flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants adventurer Luke Purdue (John Krasinski, in a role that, arguably, would have been perfect for Chris Pratt) as he tracks down his younger sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman). He wants to guilt-trip her into leaving her cosy existence as a museum curator and join him to track down the Fountain of Youth, the mythical spring said to reverse the ageing process and cure sickness. It’s all at the behest, and on the dime, of dying billionaire Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson).
