Fountain of Youth movie review: Guy Ritchie’s National Treasure wannabe offers no rich bounty

The Vanderbilt name is one of the most famous of all the American Gilded Age families.

It started with Cornelius Vanderbilt, who made his fortune through shipping and railroads, and was considered the richest American when he died in 1877.

The family’s riches faded over time but there are still prominent Vanderbilts kicking around, the direct descendants of Cornelius’s line. The most high-profile is broadcaster Anderson Cooper, whose mother was Gloria Vanderbilt, while lesser known is actor Timothy Olyphant, a fourth great-grandson of Cornelius.

A distant cousin of theirs is James Vanderbilt, a screenwriter whose credits include Zodiac, White House Down, Independence Day: Resurgence and Fountain of Youth, the new Guy Richie adventure epic about treasure hunters looking for the mythical spring.

The Vanderbilt of it all is interesting because one of the set-pieces in Fountain of Youth involves resurfacing the wreck of the luxurious passenger liner RMS Lusitania, which was sunk by a German U-boat about 20 kilometres off the coast of Ireland in 1915.

Almost 1200 people were killed including Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Cornelius’s great-grandson, and screenwriter James’ great-grandfather. By the by, dynastic American families had bad luck with big boats - an Astor and a Guggenheim went down on the Titanic, while a Vanderbilt in-law was also on the Lusitania but survived.

So, if you’re keeping track, the screenwriter wrote into the Fountain of Youth a plot point that involves the historical event which killed his famous ancestor, and specifically his great-granddaddy - the characters only un-sink the Lusitania because they’re looking for something in the Vanderbilt safe.

All this context is not necessarily pertinent to the movie itself but the Wikipedia rabbit hole the double Vanderbilt connection triggered is far more fascinating and gripping than anything you’ll find on screen in the thoroughly ludicrous Fountain of Youth.

Starring John Krasinski, Natalie Portman, Eiza Gonzalez, Domhnall Gleeson and, in what amounts to little more than a cameo, Stanley Tucci, Fountain of Youth is a National Treasure wannabe that is quite bad, but not as terrible as the trailer suggested.

Directed by Guy Ritchie, it spins from one set-piece to the next with almost no consideration for a throughline, detail, depth or, you know, physics. The only consistency is its whiplash.

There’s a tipping point between spectacle and silly that makes it very hard to come back once that suspend-your-disbelief bubble has been popped.

The Lusitania sequence is a perfect but not isolated example. In the film, the plan is to surface the ship and find a lost masterpiece painting in the safe. As quickly as you can snap your fingers, the century-old shipwreck is being elevated through the water by big giant air bags.

No explanation, just go with it? At least in Godzilla Minus One when they tried to sink the kaiju using a version of this plan, the characters had to go through how it would work (or not work), which helped the audience become invested in the operation. Here, you don’t care.

Krasinski plays Luke Purdue, a watered down Indy, while Portman is Charlotte, his sister, who has been out of the treasure hunting game but is roped in during her divorce. They bicker over everything, including the legacy of their dad.

Luke, whose motivations are never clear (Glory? A challenge? He was bored?) is working with billionaire Owen Carver (Gleeson), who is dying from cancer and wants to find the Fountain of Youth to restore his health, and is funding the whole adventure. They have two associates (The Boys’ Laz Alonso and The Penguin’s Carmen Ejogo) who you’ll forget are there.

The quest involves pilfering artworks, raising shipwrecks, looking for clues in rare book collections and a climactic sequence at the Pyramids of Giza. All standard treasure hunting stuff.

Complicating matters is two groups of antagonists on the chase – one, led by Gonzalez’s weapons-wielding gang, are protectors of the Fountain, while another is an Interpol agent (Arian Moayed).

Everyone uses far too much deadly violence, machine guns and all, for it to be remotely plausible, but this is a Ritchie movie so he’s not going to be happy unless there’s the pop-pop-pop rhythm of gunfire, although you’ll never actually see a dead body or any blood beyond a trickle.

From the shallow characterisations and the jumpy plotting to the flat CGI, Fountain of Youth is no bounty worth seeking. The only thing it has going for it is that at least it shot in some good-looking locations.

Rating: 2/5

Fountain of Youth is streaming on Apple TV+