Released: 23rd May
Seen: 26th May
The first streaming company to ever win a Best Picture Oscar was Apple TV+ who pulled off this genuinely impressive feat with a little film called CODA, a touching little comedy about a family where everyone except the eldest daughter was deaf and how she wanted to break out on her own even though that would end up creating a problem for her family and their business. It was a genuinely impressive moment for Apple, their streaming service was one of the smaller ones on the market with only eight narrative feature films to their name at that point. It gave them some sort of prestige, maybe Apple was going to be the smart streaming service that would make smaller interesting films that could be awards contenders or at least not churn out films so bland and basic that the term ‘content’ is the only way to fairly describe them… and now they’ve released Fountain of Youth, Apple’s moved into the content industry.
Fountain of Youth follows Luke Purdue (John Krasinski), an archeologist and occasional art thief who is about to embark on his latest adventure trying to find the titular fountain of youth. In the process of solving the mystery that will lead him to the fountain, Luke manages to get his estranged sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman) dragged along to accompany them so they can take advantage of her expertise. On this wild ride is also a dying billionaire, the only good kind of billionaire, Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson) and Charlotte’s son Thomas (Benjamin Chivers) and two other people who are so irrelevant they won’t be in the third act of the film and won’t be named here because I have genuinely forgotten their character names, they mean that little to the plot. So this little group have to try and find the fountain of youth by looking for clues on the backs of ancient paintings all while being followed by the police and some woman called Esme (Eiza González) who has Stanley Tucci as a mentor in scenes that seem to have been shot on Tucci’s lunch break on a film he actually gave a shit about.
So, Fountain of Youth is basically a discount knockoff of Indiana Jones with all the personality and interesting plot elements scraped off for no reason other than “the corporation that put this together doesn’t give a fuck”. It’s really just that simple, Apple spent a lot of money getting a wildly talented cast, a unique and interesting director and a writer who has a half-decent track record of writing interesting scripts and told them to just phone it in. It’s kind of staggering how every element of this film is just running on autopilot. Hell, it feels unfair to say it’s running on autopilot because at least autopilot will eventually get you to where you want to go and all Fountain of Youth did was exist on my TV screen for 125 minutes. What should be a fun over the top, bombastic ride ends up just kind of failing at every hurdle.
There’s nothing wrong, theoretically, with being a ripoff of Indiana Jones. Hell, Indiana Jones is a ripoff of other movies that came before it, but it also knew to take the ideas it was lifting and infuse it with a unique sense of tone. Tone is just about the most important thing that makes a fun Indiana Jones ripoff work but the tone of Fountain of Youth is “The check cleared”, which isn’t fun. It’s extra painful here because the man directing this film is Guy Ritchie and maybe it’s just me but the idea of Guy Ritchie’s blokish style taking on Indiana Jones is exciting to me. The man who made The Gentlemen bringing that kind of energy to a grand adventure should be a blast, a big stupid fun time with a lot of rough edges and colourful characters but you can actively feel him holding back. There’s a scene where a character literally stops themselves from saying ‘fuck’ in a moment that felt mandated by the studio to achieve a PG rating. Any moments of violence are toned down to the point where it’s almost hard to tell if a character is dead or just pining for the fjords. It’s so lifeless that the only reason I know this is a Guy Ritchie film is because I looked it up, his flavour is not anywhere to be found and if that’s a choice Guy made then it’s a bad one, if the studio made him tone his style down then that’s the worst choice Apple has made in a while.
Even if we ignore the problems of removing Guy’s style, Fountain of Youth also just kind of fails as an adventure film on its own. Part of the fun of these kinds of films is the elaborate ways that they try to find the mythical artifact, watching someone realise that holding a piece of glass at a certain angle makes a beam of light bounce off a mirror to light a candle that opens a door is a joyful thing to witness… This film goes with “Well let’s just blow up this wall in the pyramid” or “What if I played this musical sequence on my Apple Mac Laptop instead of a piano” instead, because films should be as bland and basic as real life and we don’t need to do the fun thing. It feels like every time there was a chance for Fountain of Youth to do something fun and interesting, it went with being dull and corporate instead. Yes there were some half decent action scenes, an occasional shootout or a car chase that could’ve been fun if it consisted of more than a series of left turns but most of the time it felt like they were going with the blunt option instead of the fun option which made the film feel kind of disposable and pointless.
Now this could all be forgiven if maybe the characters were unique or interesting… Remember how earlier in this review I didn’t bother to name several characters because they were forgettable and I didn’t care? Yeah, I could’ve done that joke for every single character in Fountain of Youth because no one in this film is presenting a memorable or interesting character. Truth be told, the only reason any of the characters are watchable is because the actors playing them are just that charismatic. I don’t give a flying fuck about what happens to Luke Purdue, but John Krasinski is a charming enough actor that I can pretty easily sit through a couple of hours of him running about and awkwardly flirting with someone trying to kill him. I have no interest in the family drama of Charlotte Purdue, but Natalie Portman is a lovable icon who can make just about anything interesting, so it’s no drama giving her a few hours of my time. The actors are certainly trying to make something fun and watchable but they aren’t being helped by the script or the direction; they just have enough natural charm that it’s not painful to sit there while they do things.
It was roughly around the scene where the characters are being told that a mysterious code is actually a set of music notes that they hear for the first time by entering the music notes into an Apple Laptop, where it hit me that Fountain of Youth isn’t a film, it’s content. It’s not for watching, it’s for playing in the background. Congrats Apple, you have made it as a steamer by making bland boring shit like Netflix churns out every other week. Fountain of Youth is not a film made with the desire to make a fun romp, it’s a piece of content made with the express intention of filling space on a digital shelf in order to attract a customer base looking for something to play in the background while they do their taxes or practice origami. It’s not so bad that you need to turn it off at any point, but it’s not good enough that you want to pay attention.
If Wikipedia is to be believed, they spent 180 million to make Fountain of Youth. For that money they have a 2-hour film sitting on a digital storefront that will be forgotten in a week if they’re lucky. For that amount of money, they could’ve made 18 CODA’s, films that actually tell interesting stories with charming characters that people wanted to watch. All these streamers that are fighting for our money and our eyeballs could be making interesting films that demand an audience, that normal studios wouldn’t dare try to make but could find a life on the internet and instead they’re making basic content that’s just a dull approximation of something we’ve seen before. Fountain Of Youth has nothing to offer, which is staggering considering the talent and money that went into making it. It’s another bland basic flavourless film on a streaming service that is made because they need to have something for their subscribers to watch and, apparently, can’t be fucked to just make a good fun interesting movie.
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