Title – Fountain of Youth (2025)

Director – Guy Ritchie (Snatch)

Cast – John Krasinski, Natalie Portman, Eiza González, Domhnall Gleeson

Plot – Siblings Luke (Krasinski) and Charlotte Purdue (Portman) set off on a globe spanning adventure to seek out the legendary Fountain of Youth.

“Life is about the adventure”

Review by Eddie on 30/05/2025

In recent times it has been reported that Apple is losing upwards of $1 billion a year on its streaming service Apple TV+ an incredible figure for all the wrong reasons but when you get to see how they spent $180 million of their yearly budget on a film like Guy Ritchie’s Fountain of Youth, it starts to make a little more sense.

Continuing on Ritchie’s out of no where quest to seemingly become the Eric Roberts of Hollywood directors, with four films and two TV shows currently listed on his upcoming schedule and arriving hot off the heels of his work on recent features such as The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, The Covenant and Operation Fortune as well as hit series Mobland and The Gentleman, Youth finds a director very much out of sync with what made him such a popular industry figure in the late 90’s and early 2000’s with Apple TV+’s original offering a DOA experience that is a sad and sorry copycat of many other much better adventure films.

Borrowing from and operating in the same lane as a range of past films such as Indiana Jones, The Mummy, National Treasure, Sahara and Uncharted, Youth is the type of big dumb Hollywood style globe spanning escapade we don’t get a lot of these days but while we should be happy Apple has come out in support of a beloved yet dormant sub-genre of film, there’s nothing within Ritchie’s soulless feature that could be regarded as a fun viewing experience.

Attempting to turn John Krasinski into an Indiana Jones protagonist but forgetting to give him any charisma or spark, honestly I am unsure if Krasinski’s art thief/treasure hunter Luke Purdue even succeeds or does anything in the whole two hours of run time, Youth tries to get us on board with Luke and his sister Charlotte’s (a lost feeling Natalie Portman) quest to uncover the secrets of the long fabled Fountain of Youth but with James Vanderbilt’s cringe-worthy script and Ritchie’s brazenly boorish direction, no amount of budget spend or pretty locales makes up for Youth’s diabolically poor end product.

Outside of its shameless waste of funding and sleepwalking cast, that includes slumming it Eiza González and Domhnall Gleeson, the most glaringly sad and depressing thing about this cookie-cutter affair is the listless directional work of Ritchie.

While Swept Away will forever remain his most darkest hour, Youth begs the question of the talented filmmaker in a way we haven’t had to ask before and it makes one wonder if we have now seen the golden years of a generational talent that once seemed destined for greatness based off the work of his one two double punch of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.

Having fun previously with his well-liked Sherlock Holmes features and bringing some spark to his box-office smash Aladdin and even his box-office duds The Man From U.N.C.L.E and King Arthur, it’s not like Ritchie hasn’t made great frivolous pieces of entertainment before but Youth has none of his trademark editing, zany camerawork or imagination.

Anyone could have directed this film in its finished presented format and with Road House 2 and Aladdin 2 in his scheduled to come projects, you can’t help but feel Ritchie is no longer inspired to direct outside of what paycheque is available.

Final Say –

A sad and sorry waste of Apple’s substantial funds and the various talents involved, Fountain of Youth is a bland, generic and forgettable offering that pinpoints all that is wrong with streaming providers splashing cash on original content with little to no quality control or reason.

1 floating shipwreck out of 5