‘Fountain of Youth’ Review: John Krasinski and Natalie Portman Try to Rustle Up Their Own ‘Indiana Jones’ Adventure

Director Guy Ritchie adds some serious action to an occasionally muddled, broadly entertaining story about whip-smart siblings with a panache for finding (and often stealing) priceless art and huge treasures.

Cribbing extremely liberally from the wider Indiana Jones franchise (and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” in particular), Guy Ritchie’s “Fountain of Youth” offers a family-friendly (beyond its unnecessarily long running time) entry into the ol’ treasure-hunting for fortune-and-glory adventure space. Occasionally muddled, mostly convoluted, and yet still broadly entertaining, it’s a shame this glossy and big budget affair (you really can’t fake Egyptian pyramids like these), will only exist as a streaming pick on Apple TV+. If a spend-y, widely appealing feature like this (with big movie stars and a big name director to boot) can’t make the jump to the big screen, what can?

That’s not at all to say the film is particularly good, but it does offer that vaunted “four-quadrant appeal” that presumably would get plenty of butts in seats at the local multiplex. Too long, oddly complicated, and weirdly violent for a film aimed at families, it’s still bombastic filmmaking with a little bit of something for everyone. If nothing else, two genuinely astonishing action set pieces (one, a very extended car chase, the other, an incredible shipwreck deep-dive) and an eye-popping trip straight into said pyramids are worth the price of admission. In this case, that price is an Apple TV+ subscription.

Ritchie kicks things off in high-octane style, care of a Bangkok-spanning bike and car chase, which immediately flows into a train-set action sequence, all of that going straight into a London-set heist and car chase. If you’re confused already, the spectacle will help things go down.

Despite following their exploits, we learn precious little about the Purdue siblings, smooth-talking thief Luke (John Krasinski, much better when he’s allowed to move past the character’s early smarminess) and the seemingly more strait-laced Charlotte (Natalie Portman) over the course of the film, written by James Vanderbilt. What we do know is certainly enough to get by — again, Luke is a thief, while Charlotte has tried to play by the rules for a long time — but considering how very much the sibs lean on the memory of their archaeologist dad (never shown, but named “Harrison,” cheeky!) and his apparently long-winded speeches about the value of the journey, a touch more backstory would have helped.

Alas, we’re mostly left to parse thesaurus-influenced conversations between the pair (both Luke and Charlotte will always opt for the longest possible word, all the better to remind us how smart they are) and a series of increasingly icky dream sequences in which Luke appears to struggle with the fallout from stealing a precious artifact their dad revered. The pair are reunited after Luke makes off with a pair of classic paintings (one in Bangkok, the other in curator Charlotte’s own London museum) that he needs for extremely complicated ends.

As the film’s title boldly announces, Luke and his team (including an underwritten Carmen Ejogo and Laz Alonso) are looking for nothing less than the actual Fountain of Youth. Their quest is being financed by the fabulously wealthy Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleason, having fun with a thin role), who happens to be dying of liver cancer and will literally spare no expense — and happily spend his days with a group of verbose art thieves — to find a cure. On their tail: Eiza González as Esme, a protector of the fountain and things like it (again, hello, “Last Crusade”), and Arian Moayed as Inspector Jamal Abbas, a London cop who has spent way too much time reading Sherlock Holmes books.

Through a series of complications and contrivances, Charlotte and her young musical prodigy son Thomas (Benjamin Chivers) join up with the (illegal, probably also immoral) quest to find the so-called key to eternity. Mostly, this involves looking at the backs of paintings, trying to crack silly codes, stealing a whole bunch of stuff, drinking champagne, and running through absolutely gorgeous scenery (Ritchie shot on location in London, Vienna, and Egypt’s Pyramids of Giza, and it shows). It’s totally silly and very funny, even as it becomes increasingly less clear what’s actually going on and worryingly obvious who the real baddie is here.

The Purdues’ quest to find the fountain involves all manner of clue-cracking (see: backs of paintings, sides of bibles, plenty of dead languages), which inevitably lead to stunning real-world locations. By the middle of the film, the sibs and the team are literally hoisting the RMS Lusitania up into open water to find (yes) another painting; by the end, they’re venturing inside the pyramids (and, yes, the production really did go inside these wonders of the world) to discover untold wonders and a truly worrying number of stairs. At both locales? Plenty of gunfights and hand-to-hand combat too, all the better to keep things as fast-moving and confounding as possible.

Some mysteries can’t ever be cracked, but “Fountain of Youth” sure tries to keep the journey through this one (thanks, Dad Purdue!) as flashy — and, hell, even sometimes quite fun — as possible. You could do far worse with a streaming subscription price.

Grade: B-

“Fountain of Youth” starts streaming Friday, May 23 on Apple TV+. 

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