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In 1981 Steven Spielberg and George Lucas released the box-office-busting adventure film Raiders of the Lost Ark earning $354 million dollars and setting off a wave of copycat movies hoping to reproduce that lightning in a bottle financial effect.
Most of the copycat productions were of limited budgets, lacking major stars, and frankly poor-quality scripts. As with Alien before it, Raiders of the Lost Ark is singular and stands out well ahead of any imitators.
Now, 44 years after Raiders of the Lost Ark, comes another imitator trying to capture that sense of adventure and fun that so marked the original film, Guy Ritchie’s Fountain of Youth.
Siblings Luke and Charlotte Purdue (John Krasinski and Natalie Portman) the children of an
Apple TV+
adventure-loving archeologist are estranged because Luke continues their father’s adventuring ways while Charlotte has settled into a routine mundane existence as a museum curator. Luke pulls Charlotte out of her dull life and onto a globe-spanning hunt for clues hidden in historical artifacts for the location of the fabled Fountain of Youth. They are being bankrolled by billionaire Owen Carter seeking to avoid an untimely death due to liver cancer. Along the way they are pursued by both Interpol for the crimes they are committing and a shadowy secret society.
With Guy Ritchie directing and Apple producing Fountain of Youth is no cheap, hastily thrown-together production of a movie. It boasts an impressive list of talent, shooting locations around the world, well-crafted action and chase scenes, but still fails to be engaging.
The characters are reflections of archetypes seen over and over again. Attempts to give them rich inner lives that might elevate them from flat to people with depth utterly fail and no chemistry exists either on the screen or the page for the enemy to lovers subplot between Luke and the woman representing the secret society determined to stop him.
At no point was I ever really caring about the characters or events on the screen, which is not how I always feel about Guy Ritchie’s work. He has directed some very entertaining and engrossing films, but this is not one of them. It does strike me that anytime Ritchie strays from modern criminal London his odds of producing a movie I really like drops considerably.
Fountain of Youth is streaming on Apple TV+.
