Fountain of Youth (2025)
Directed by Guy Ritchie
A treasure-hunting mastermind assembles a team for a life-changing adventure. But to outwit and outrun threats at every turn, he'll need someone even smarter than he is: his estranged sister.
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7 films that influenced Fountain of Youth
What critics say influenced Fountain of Youth
Frustratingly, certain elements are there. Another inspiration was Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy films, in terms of the two leads. You could entirely imagine Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz as Luke and Charlotte in another space and time, albeit with the tweak of being siblings rather than a romantic pairing.
Without giving anything away, González’s Esme reminds me of The Mummy’s Ardeth Bay, played by Oded Fehr.
Guy Ritchie's Fountain Of Youth consciously tries to muscle in on Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Stephen Sommers' The Mummy and Uncharted (the games).
More recently, Ritchie turned his talents toward Fountain of Youth, an earnest rip-off of Raiders of the Lost Ark that wears its Spielberg inspirations on its sleeve. On one hand, the film exhaustively mimics the rapid pacing and globe-trotting thrills of its model, yet on the other, it marches forward without a single wink of humor, self-awareness, or playful irony. Consequently, the adventure unfolds in a safe and overly predictable pattern, striving to recapture that lighthearted caper tone but only igniting fitful sparks of excitement.
Ritchie and writer James Vanderbilt got the memo, clearly, with a beginning and end that lift pretty directly from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, respectively. Spielberg's adventure franchise has seen plenty of knockoffs over the decades, but few feel as transparently shallow as this.
Heck, even Jon Turteltaub's 2004 bauble-hunting flick "National Treasure" tried to tie an element of hefty, history-forward American patriotism into its caper sequences.
National Treasure, which starred Nicolas Cage, is perhaps the more apposite comparison in terms of style, and given both are modern day as opposed to the period trappings of Indiana Jones. But even National Treasure was derivative. Fountain Of Youth arrives decades later with a wealth of similar pictures in the slipstream and can’t do enough to distinguish itself among them.
This could double as a descriptor of the action-film approach of Guy Ritchie, whose lad-cinema legacy of Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or mas-macho misfires like The Gentlemen or RocknRolla suggests something rowdier than what he often rustles up.
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This could double as a descriptor of the action-film approach of Guy Ritchie, whose lad-cinema legacy of Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or mas-macho misfires like The Gentlemen or RocknRolla suggests something rowdier than what he often rustles up.
Even 2024’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare didn’t find all that much ribaldry in its R rating. The director’s latest, streaming Friday exclusively on Apple TV+, rests somewhere between the for-hire anonymity of King Arthur: Just Plain Bad or 2019’s Aladdin and the joie de vivre of programmatic capers like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre.
In fact, his take on Sherlock Holmes strips away the stiff Victorian aura in favor of a brilliant bloke who mans a private fight club and hides away in a secret man-cave. Similarly, in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., when Henry Cavill’s Napoleon Solo awakens to discover he has been drugged, he casually flops onto a couch, carefully smooths down his glossy hair, and barely registers the woozy haze after all, he knows that feeling all too well.