(courtesy IMP Awards)
We are a people consumed by endless wonder and curiosity.
Evidence of it is everywhere if you care to look for it, but if you’re a pop culture tragic like this reviewer, you see it most often in movies and books and streaming shows where stories lean hard into our capacity, and almost need for, the world to be more tantalising and mysterious than it often seems to be.
That’s not entirely fair to the world since it’s a pretty thrilling and inertia-busting place on the whole – stuck in the rut of day-to-day bill paying, commuting and life stuff, it can be easy to miss how magical everything actually is – but whatever the merits of wanderlust storytelling, it seems to fill a need we all have for things to be bigger and other.
The latest movie to mine this deep and hard and with disbelief suspended so hard you may get whiplash at some point, is Fountain of Youth, a Guy Ritchie movie which leans hard into the idea that the fantastical is out there somewhere and we just have to find it.
A mix of influences from The Mummy to Indiana Jones (specifically, The Temple of Doom) to the National Treasure franchise, which delightfully the believability envelope to breaking, with a beguiling hint of the globe roaming excitement and adventure of the Bourne movies or Mission: Impossible, Fountain of Youth is a ton of escapist blockbuster fun.
Granted, it’s not going to win an Oscar any time soon, and it does run hard with cardboard characters and a recycled plot you’ve seen before a thousand times, but good lord, watching it is an absolute thrill and a half, thanks to the fact that it leans into some fairly preposterous ideas and just runs with it.
Helping its sometimes threadbare narrative cause – though the imagination at work here by screenwriter James Vanderbilt is first-rate, as is its propensity for witty, snappy oneliners – are hugely likeable performances by its two leads, John Krasinski and Natalie Portman, who play brother and sister archeologist duo Luke and Charlotte Purdue.
Older brother Luke is a fast-talking, garrulous, rule-breaking maverick who roams the world seizing goods, ostensibly to hand back to their rightful owners, but who plays fast and loose with archeological norms, something which disgusts his more conventional sister who has chosen life as a museum curator and married mum.
Luke doesn’t think much of Charlotte’s safe choices, and with typical, thoughtless bravado – while he’s a ton of fun to watch, he’s also a bit of an asshat, ripping into peoples’ lives, especially Charlotte’s, with little thought or care – he steals a Rembrandt from her museum one day, part of his quest to find the mythical Fountain of Youth sought by billionaire Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson).
His break-in and the subsequent adrenaline-fuelled car chase through London, where the police are as incompetent and hopeless at their jobs as they are in every blockbuster which elevates the renegades over the conventional for storytelling purposes, kicks off Fountain of Youth which veers between careering, mind-boggling action sequences and some funny, more thoughtful moments.
It is, on the whole though, a pedal-to-the-metal affair, and while that means sacrificing a whole of nuance and some meaningful character interactions is lost – for instance, in no sane world, would Charlotte risk custody of her musical prodigy son, Thomas (Benjamin Chivers) to keep reckless adventureman, Luke happy but she does time and again; thank goodness the movie moves so fast you can’t ruminate on that too much – Fountain of Youth is more concerned with a good time than a thoughtful time anyway.
It references some of the issues in play but not in any in-depth way with any discussions, such as they are, thrown up by the differing approaches by the Purdue siblings to archeology and life as whole treated more as a grist for witty back-and-forths in dialogue that dances so fast and light any real emotional depth kind of goes out the window.
But at the end of the day, Fountain of Youth is simply meant to be thrown off the shackles of life escapist entertainment and it delivers on that very well indeed.
If you’re looking for a film that goes way out there and which posits that lost Rembrandts lie in shipwrecks at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean and that the Pyramids hide some pretty impressive mythical places, then you are going to love how far out Fountain of Youth goes.
Sure, it loses itself in the action scenes at times, and confuses endless forward momentum with substantial storytelling, but it is, by and large, exactly the kind of film you need when life feels all too much and you simply want to believe the fantastical is just waiting there for us to discover.
This reviewer watched it in the midst of recovering from a rather savage bout of the flu, and weighed down by ill-health and the suppressed mood that comes with life grinding to a halt with no real permission from you, Fountain of Youth was just what this ailing soul needed.
It’s possible that we have forgotten the power of batsh*t crazy, escapist storytelling.
Eighties and Nineties blockbusters knew it well, and part of their outrageously garrulous narrative conceit was that they knew their plots were OTT, their performances so far beyond nuanced they were hilariously chaotic and their propensity for ruminative thought next to nothing, and our compact with them as audiences was that we bought into it all, hook, line and sinker and we didn’t try to poke any holes in their teetering, tottering but hugely fun fabric.
If you want, you could criticise Fountain of Youth for a thousand and one cinematic sins, and it is, to be fair, nothing really new under the moviemaking sun even down to The Mummy-esque Elders (cue Eiza González and Stanley Tucci) who protect the temptations of the mythical fountain from easy corrupted people, but it’s diversionary, kick-up-your-heels fun, carried along by spirited performances, and it is just what the slide into fascistic, climate change nightmare, war ravaged current times desperately needs.