Josh Reviews Fountain of Youth

In Fountain of Youth, we meet estranged siblings Luke (John Krasinski) and Charlotte (Natalie Portman).  Luke is a charismatic but somewhat shady thief; when the movie opens, he’s stealing a painting, and pretty soon he’s gotten his sister Charlotte into trouble by stealing another painting from the museum where she works as a curator.  Turns out there are secrets hidden in those paintings that might lead to the location of the Fountain of Youth.  Against her better judgment, Charlotte and her young son Thomas join Luke on this adventure, alongside Luke’s partners Patrick (Laz Alonso) and Deb (Carmen Ejogo) and their wealthy patron Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), who is dying of a disease he is hoping the Fountain of Youth will cure.

I’ve been a Guy Ritchie fan ever since 1998’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and 2000’s Snatch.  Unfortunately, I don’t feel he’s ever been able to equal those two terrific films in his subsequent work. (2009’s Sherlock Holmes probably comes closest for me, followed by 2020’s The Gentlemen.)  Over the years, I’ve followed Mr. Ritchie into more mainstream fare, and while I haven’t always loved those projects, I think he’s often found ways to bring some style & verve into those movies.  I quite enjoyed his (wonderfully titled) recent film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.  

I was excited to see Fountain of Youth.  I like this cast, and the idea of Guy Ritchie making a modern-day Indiana Jones movie felt like a solid idea to me.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this movie works at all.  I don’t know what happened here.

This movie is basically a warmed over version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  But in pretty much every way that film works, this film doesn’t.

The opening minutes had me intrigued by the introduction to John Krasinski’s Luke.  His costume design has that Indiana Jones professor/adventurer look, and in theory Mr. Krasinski has the charisma and comedic touch to be able to pull off this type of character.  But I never felt I understood who this character Luke was supposed to be.  Mr. Krasinski plays him too arch in my opinion; what we see on screen doesn’t feel genuine to me, it’s almost like this guy Luke is putting on a persona.  Some of the comedic banter works, but other moments felt fake or false to me.  It takes the movie far too long to convey to us whether Luke is a good guy or a rogue.  Watching the entire opening, we have no idea why Luke is stealing the painting and for whom.  The movie muddles establishing his character clearly and it never really recovers from that.

The movie’s opening also, unfortunately, demonstrated to me another problem.  The movie opens with what in theory should be two fun, exciting pre-credits action scenes: the bike chase and then the train fight between Luke and Eiza González’s character Esme.  But those sequences felt limp to me.  I wasn’t excited or hooked.  I think a major issue is that the movie doesn’t have anything close to the rollicking John Williams score that was so important to the Indiana Jones movies.  It’s fascinating how weak these scenes feel without it!  The master John Williams’ work was so vital.

There’s a critical scene in the early section of the film in which John Krasinski’s Luke explains that they’re searching for the Fountain of Youth.  This is an important scene in this type of movie.  In Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, those scenes that set up the quest are fun and interesting!  But here the scene felt flat to me.  Maybe it’s not fair to keep comparing this movie to the Indy movies, which are some of the best movies ever made.  But the film seems to repeatedly invite the comparison by being so derivative in structure to The Last Crusade specifically.  (Eiza González’s character is basically working for the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword from Last Crusade!!)

There are all sorts of other times watching the film when the storytelling choices baffled me.  There’s a scene that involves a huge operation to lift a giant portion of the wreck of the Louisitania, which seemed crazily elaborate and expensive for this small team of thieves on the run from the law to be involved with.  In fact, the gang spends much of the film on the run — and the cops learn early on that the wealthy Carver is working with them — and yet they seem to be able to travel freely wherever they go.  There’s a scene in which Luke talks about wanting his family name to be remembered, but the movie had not established what their family name actually was (or if it did, it didn’t do so in a memorable enough way for me to remember it when that scene happened).  There are several sequences in which a ton of innocent police officers get murdered (the mid-movie gun-fight with the mob in the team’s base with the paintings, and then the insanely huge gunfight outside the pyramids in Egypt), and yet there don’t seem to be any consequences.  Late in the movie, the gang shows that they have a scan of the chambers under the pyramids, and yet somehow their scans missed the HUGE empty chamber the size of a football stadium that they later discover?  Why do they telegraph one character’s revelation as a villain (and ruin what might have been a fun surprise) by having Natalie Portman’s Charlotte question his motives in a scene on the plane only a few moments before he’s revealed as evil?  The ending of the movie is so confusing they needed an insert scene of Stanley Tucci’s character explaining what was happening.  Oy!

The idea that the estranged grown-up children of Indiana Jones have to put aside their differences and go on a globe-spanning archaeological adventure is a great idea for a movie!!  But the movie basically skirts over that story; it never really digs into these characters, nor is the globe-spanning adventure stuff as fun and exciting as it should be.

There was a lot of talent involved with this film, both in front of and behind the camera.  (I was so excited that Carmen Ejogo was in this movie, after her masterful performance in The Penguin.  Sadly she has nothing to do here.  Same goes for Eiza González, who  was a standout in Mr. Richie’s previous film, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, but plays a one-dimensional character here.)  I wonder what went wrong with this film.  Was this really the movie they all set out to make?  For me, this was a swing and a miss.

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