Fountain of Youth

FULL SPOILER-FREE REVIEW @ https://fandomwire.com/fountain-of-youth-review/ "Fountain of Youth is a prime example of how to craft quality, crowd-pleasing entertainment without reinventing the wheel. Is it predictable? Absolutely. Formulaic? No doubt. But it’s undeniably fun, visually engaging, and driven by a charismatic cast and a director who knows exactly what he’s doing. Guy Ritchie brings his trademark energy without betraying the genre’s core identity, and James Vanderbilt delivers a solid, compelling script. It’s a shame the film didn’t get the theater release it deserved – like the ancient sites it explores, it should have been experienced in all its grandeur." Rating: B

Fountain of Youth (2025) is an ill-conceived Guy Ritchie foray into Dan Brown territory by way of National Treasure and Tomb Raider that rips off the endings of both Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade and Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In addition to being derivative, Fountain of Youth is too long, half-baked, and needlessly contrived. The more it endeavors to sound plausible, the more far-fetched it comes across. There’s no such thing as a fountain of youth. Nothing you can say is going to persuade me otherwise. The good news is that you don’t have to convince me. This is a fictional action-adventure film about, as Natalie Portman’s character puts it, “a literal liquid that expresses itself through a magical fountain that, once consumed, gives access to an eternal bliss-filled life.” As a matter of general principle, I approach this sort of material, sight unseen, in a default state of pre-suspended disbelief. It’s understood that for the next two hours, I’ll buy that the fountain of youth exists — so why is Ritchie so stubborn about selling me on it? “There’s a seed of truth cloaked within every myth, metaphor, or fable,” says the hero (similes, on the other hand, are bogus). According to this crackpot synecdoche, talking hares and tortoises regularly race each other, baseball is intercourse, and you will go blind if you don’t quit beating off. Moreover, “Herodotus wrote about [the fountain of youth]. The Mahabharata talks about it. Alexander the Great traveled the world looking for it.” While generally reliable, Herodotus was an embellisher who never let facts get in the way of a good story. The “seed of truth” theory applies to the Mahabharata only when it relates events that could have conceivably happened within the natural laws that govern the material world. And Alexander the Great never searched for the fountain of youth any more than Ponce de Leon did. Like I said, you don’t have to convince me that the fountain is real, especially when it entails going out of your way to remind me that it isn’t. You’re only succeeding in belaboring a point that ought to be moot. That’s nothing, though. Things are just about to get astoundingly dumber. We’re told that “In the 1600s, six artists made a pact to reveal the location [of the fountain of youth].” How they came by this knowledge is never explained. Caravaggio, Rubens, Wildens, Velázquez, El Greco, and Rembrandt each “hid a clue in their paintings.” This “pact” couldn’t have taken place later than 1610, the year Caravaggio died — when Velazquez and Rembrandt happened to be 11 and four years old, respectively. D’oh! Unsurprisingly, the pact involves paintings painted long after Caravaggio passed away. This plot device would be stultifyingly convoluted and the logistics alone nightmarish even if the chronology added up. The script, however, is not just careless but lazy too. The “clues” are not hidden in the paintings. They are on the back of the paintings, which of course means that what the paintings are and who painted them makes no difference. It could be any six works by any six artists, because the filmmakers couldn’t be bothered to examine the paintings for items that could be interpreted by the characters as actual clues. I’m reminded of Peter Greenaway’s Nightwatching, which is also a bunch of crock, but at least it's a great-looking crock that someone clearly gave a lot of thought to. Fountain of Youth has no regard for historical accuracy, no interest in the fine arts except as a vessel for arcana (and barely, at that), no attention to detail, and no internal logic. It’s the kind of slipshod hackjob that Bible-decoding, lunatic fringe-dwelling conspiracy nuts will lap up.