There’s a school of thought that says audiences require protagonists they can relate to, but I come from a different school. A cool school, where classes never start before 11am and no one uses AI to do their homework. At my school we teach that when it comes to fun genre films, what matters most is that the audience wants to hang out with the hero, since that’s essentially what we’re doing for two hours whether we relate to them or not. It’s not necessary to see ourselves in a hero, we don’t have to share their experiences or their worldview. We just need to be willing to spend time with them. That’s not much to ask.
So with that in mind, let me say the following: I would seriously consider cutting off one of my own fingers if it meant I didn’t have to spend two hours alone in a room with John Krasinski’s protagonist from Guy Ritchie’s “Fountain of Youth.” In the long, long, long line of wisecracking adventurers who’ve seen “Indiana Jones” too many times, this “Luke Pardue” guy is easily one of the least likable adventurers I’ve ever seen. It almost doesn’t matter what movie he’s in. I don’t want to see him save the world. I don’t even want to see him save a local youth shelter by breakdancing. He’s just that annoying.
Luke Pardue is an international treasure hunter. Hey, good for him! It’s hard to make a living in that line of work and anyone who can pull it off without resorting to side hustles deserves a pat on the back. But he’s also smug to an interminable degree. When we first meet him he tries to smarm his way out of returning a stolen painting, then gets in a big honking motorcycle chase, then unconvincingly flirts with Esme (Eiza González), who has good reasons to stop him. Unfortunately she’ll gradually fall for his charmy smarms over the course of the film. Luke and Esme’s relationship is only convincing when she’s trying to kill him.
Lukle also loves obliterating his sister’s life. She’s Charlotte, she’s played by Natalie Portman, and she’s trying to get custody of her son in a divorce. She also has an incredible job curating a fancy museum and writing important essays. But Luke has decided she hates that job so he steals a priceless work of art from her museum and makes it look like she was in cahoots, which means her husband will now be able to take her child away from her. There’s nothing as lovable as a guy barging into your life, telling you what you should be thinking and feeling, wrecking your whole career and potentially ruining your son’s life because he doesn’t respect you. What a charmer.
Anyway, Luke forces Charlotte to come with him by dangling custody of her son over her head, so they go hunting for the Fountain of Youth. Yes, the actual Fountain of Youth, where if you drink its water you’ll live forever, heal all wounds, or possibly turn into a baby. Look, we’ve all seen cartoons, we get the gist of it.
Luke and his team — including a dying billionaire played by Domhnall Gleeson — claim the Fountain of Youth must be real because a whole bunch of different writers talked about it (or something similar) throughout history, so there must be a nugget of truth in there somewhere. Because yeah, that’s how that works. And hundreds of writers probably wrote about Batman because Batman was real this whole time too.
All these movies about hunting for mysterious magical treasures that turn out to be real demand that we suspend that pesky disbelief of ours, and usually we’re all glad to do it. But just because we suspend our disbelief, that doesn’t mean a film can’t cut the wire and send our disbelief plummeting into a pit full of spikes. By the time Stanley Tucci shows up at the Vatican and tells Esme about the film’s vast mythology, I’m too distracted by how this movie turned into a lesser “Hudson Hawk” to get caught up in any wonder. We’re supposed to believe there’s a vast secret society keeping the Fountain of Youth secret for centuries, or possibly millennia, and not once has any of them felt a little tempted? World-building only works if you believe people could actually live in that world, and none of this sounds human.
“Fountain of Youth” was directed by Guy Ritchie, a filmmaker who likes to keep busy. He’s made a bajillion movies over the last quarter century, so he knows where to put a camera and he knows how to build an action sequence. He can make a fun thrill ride, and he’s directing this material as well as anyone could be expected too. Charlotte, and by extension Natalie Portman, spends most of the movie ticked off that she got dragged into another expensive adventure fantasy for dudes, and that I can identify with. She’s completely believable as someone who is too good to be here and knows it.
As for John Krasinski… I like John Krasinski. He’s a warm presence in a movie, and a convincing action lead. I can accept and welcome him as a pulp hero, provided he’s got a script that doesn’t make him look bad. The script for “Fountain of Youth” makes him act condescending, obtuse and selfish. Every time he does something likable we find out it was in his own self-interest, so there goes that. He wants all the other characters to be just like him, and won’t stop manipulating them until “Fountain of Youth” is populated by Luke Pardue clones. He’s a self-replicating virus, and we all know how popular those are.
It would be nice to report that “Fountain of Youth” is harmless fluff, a brisk escapist adventure with a game cast and a few fun set pieces. And I suppose it may be mostly harmless, unless you count wasting your time as a “harm” (and I wouldn’t fight you on that). But it’s annoying fluff. It’s tedious fluff. The only thing I wanted to escape was the movie itself. The cast is either trying too hard or not enough, and none of the action sequences blew me away. There’s a bit on a boat that was probably expensive. There’s a fight in a library that’s competent. There’s a shootout at the pyramids between characters we don’t know or give a damn about. There’s a big difference between “fluffy” and “empty.” “Fountain of Youth” seems to have found it.
“Fountain of Youth” is streaming exclusively on Apple TV+ on May 23.
The post ‘Fountain of Youth’ Review: Apple’s Epic Asks, ‘What If Indiana Jones Was Annoying?’ appeared first on TheWrap.