"Fountain of Youth" is Your 2025 "National Treasure" Redux
The new movie debuts on Apple TV this weekend
I suspect when you read a script with the following premise, you aren’t looking for an Oscar:
“A professional thief hunts for six Renaissance paintings containing a secret message, which are only properly read when put together, but he needs his sister to help decipher the message, which requires floating the sunken Lusitania. The purpose of all this is the search for the Fountain of Youth, whose location is preserved by a secret society of Protectors, who will stop the thieves from finding the Fountain.”
That’s a ripoff of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, if you swap a father-figure for a sister and the grail for the Fountain of Youth.
Thus, being a National Treasure type of film that has happier shades of The Da Vinci Code, Fountain of Youth is really all about the degree of sassy charisma by the leads and the movie’s formal features themselves.
Directed by Guy Ritchie, who reigns in his excesses — the movie appears to be made for families, a lighter PG-13 rating only for “salty language,” the MPA’s description I kid you not — the visuals check off the sassy-charisma box.
Natalie Portman stars as an art curator who can rattle off lines about El Greco’s historical relationship to whatever, seeming to be believe whatever she says. Her charater’s co-opted into art theft by her older brother, the movie’s Indiana Jones type, played by John Krasinski.
They’re gunning for the actual Fountain of Youth, the mythical liquid pool that supposedly gives any lucky swimmer renewed health and vigor. Domnhall Gleeson’s rich-guy character funds the operation, since he’s dying of liver cancer. They’re all pursued by one of the fountain’s Protectors (Eiza Gonzalez), a British detective (Arian Moayed), and a gang of Thai mobsters.
Is the Fountain real or a myth? While the characters tell us that every myth has a grain of truth in it, so therefore the Fountain could be real just maybe, we all know that the Fountain’s nothing more than the means to make a plucky action movie with ample sassy lines.
I see that the movie’s getting hammered in online ratings, yet it does all that you think it will do. I can recommend this to my wife, who’s always looking for a weekend movie getaway that’s appropriate for our family. It’s not as delightfully absurd as the first National Treasure, but it doesn’t take itself as seriously as The Da Vinci Code — the great sin of this kind of fare being that they posture as earnest, something Spielberg knew to avoid even in his first Indiana Jones film.
The degree to which a viewer might accept this movie depends on Krasinski, who — not to throw shade on him — has never struck me as movie-star material. That opinion goes back to his turn in George Clooney’s unwatchable football movie Leatherheads, which was when Krasinski was still playing his most famous role, Jim in the American version of The Office.
The lead role here calls for either a suave cool guy sans big nose and blocky face, nearer a James-Bond lead, or a hammier charismatic type, such as Nic Cage or Brendan Fraser in The Mummy.
It may be that Krasinski will never live down his Jim character in my mind, which is my fault mostly, and yet he’s better off playing an average guy you’d yack it up with in a bar, chatting about American pro sports, something closer to his dad role in A Quiet Place, rather than a witty, debonair art thief.
The truth is that this movie’s genre, the action-thriller centered on the search for mythical nonsense, needs to find its own Fountain of Youth. That might be done, frankly, with younger actors who are closer to 30 than 50. What this movie longs for is what the entire movie industry in America needs, a true revivification of itself, the air of something much fresher.