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Fountain Of Youth is what everyone in this film is looking for, which might lead to immortality.
As such, it sounds like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where they were looking for that cup made by some carpenter chap.
Opening with John Krasinski as Luke Purdue – or rather, the same character he always is, he’s a motorcycle courier in Thailand, biking away with a rare painting that some bad guys want, making it to the train with no time to spare, but is still found by the standard female antagonist, Esme (Eiza González), leading the band of cardboard cut-out baddies.
Meanwhile, his sister, Charlotte (Natalie Portman), works at a museum, and despite her high-flying career, he thinks nothing of stealing a painting from it, while driving a hot car and having the poolice after them, who come out of nowhere? Erm..
After taking 22 minutes to get to the point, Fountain Of Youth is one of those films where one character hasn’t got a clue about anything (Charlotte, in this case), while everyone else explains the plot to them, taking it in turns to read out paragraphs from it.
They clearly spent a lot of money on the set design, but the script feels like it was written by AI. Then again, I’m sure even AI could come up with some originality. ChatGPT’s certainly been surprisingly me, lately.
Overall, this is nothing we haven’t seen before: a punch-up here, random gunfire there – the latter resulting in a baddie’s helicopter being affected… Plus, there’s an errant cop after them, for some reason I failed to care about.
There’s also a stupid shoot-out where it’s impossible to work out who the bad guys are amongst the good guys. Everyone’s pointing in different directions and just firing indiscriminately.
On the plus side, there was a brief, amusing scene where Luke and Charlotte’s kid quizzes their friend, Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson) – who’s suffering from cancer and thinks the fountain will cure him – over how rich he is, that feels a bit like Macaulay Culkin doing the same to John Candy with multiple questions in Uncle Buck.
However, beyond that, you know that Luke and Esme want to get it on, but first, they’ll have to beat each other up for an indeterminate period.
And then Stanley Tucci turns up as Stanley Tucci. His character is known as The Elder, but it’s just Stanley Tucci being Stanley Tucci. He never does anything different.
Oh, and the further you get, the more you realise just what a wholesale ‘Last Crusade’ rip-off this film is, but on a far bigger budget. The CGI is superbly done, but when you have nothing new to say, why did they? Come on, you could’ve done FAR better than that!
Apart from that one amusing moment, I can’t understand why Fountain of Youth was made. It wasn’t for creative reasons. Everyone involved has done FAR better. For Guy Ritchie, the recent Wrath Of Man wasn’t too bad, but then he hasn’t wowed anyone since Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels.
For Natalie Portman, I still can’t recommend enough that everyone watches 2004’s Garden State, Domhnall Gleeson in Mother!, Eiza González in Baby Driver, and for Mr Krasinski, just the GIFs from the American version of The Office.
Fountain of Youth is on Apple TV+ from tomorrow. It’s not yet available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD. However, once announced, it will appear on the New DVD Blu-ray 3D and 4K releases UK list.
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 125 minutes
Release date: May 23rd 2025
Studio: Apple TV+
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1
Rating: 1/10
Director: Guy Ritchie
Producers: Ivan Atkinson, Ritchie Atkinson, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Jake Myers, Paul Neinstein, Guy Ritchie, William Sherak, James Vanderbilt, Tripp Vinson
Screenplay: James Vanderbilt
Music: Christopher Benstead
Cast:
Luke Purdue: John Krasinski
Charlotte Purdue: Natalie Portman
Esme: Eiza González
Owen Carver: Domhnall Gleeson
Inspector Jamal Abbas: Arian Moayed
Patrick Murphy: Laz Alonso
Deb McCall: Carmen Ejogo
The Elder: Stanley Tucci
Thomas: Benjamin Chivers
Praeger: Michael Epp
Kasem: Steve Tran
Harold: Daniel De Bourg
Harold’s Lawyer: Perdita Weeks
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.