"The Fountain of Youth:" Uninteresting, Predictable, and Very Expensive

When Apple TV+ launched in late 2020, it was tasked with the daunting challenge of building a media brand from the ground up. Without the rights to any back catalogue that granted other fledgling streaming services like Paramount+ and HBO Max credibility in the oversaturated streaming market, Apple banked all their luck on the strength of their original content. Luckily, Apple had a trick up their sleeve that the other streaming giants didn’t, a market value of 3 trillion dollars. Apple TV+ unveiled an original slate of projects packed to the gills with every big name that money could buy. While Netflix had the variety and Disney had the franchises, Apple came on strong with a litany of star power that would rival Classic Hollywood. However, Apple’s clever marketing strategy to attract customers by dangling celebrities like a set of shiny keys is not exactly a reliable formula for great films, case in point, Guy Ritchie’s 2025 globe-trotting adventure The Fountain of Youth.

The experience of watching The Fountain of Youth is indistinguishable from glancing at the poster – a glossy hack job done on photoshop, slapping together various world landmarks behind a disinterested cast of big names. It’s a dull husk of an adventure, consciously conforming all its pieces together to fulfill contracts that will keep Apple in the green. Once it introduces its stars and the algorithm has your view marked as “watched” the film goes limp, dragged to an unsatisfying finish just so Apple TV can recommend you something new.

Beyond being predictable, the film itself seems to be acutely aware of its shortcomings. It blindly barrels through the motions of a classic adventure film, rarely pausing for a moment as it mashes genre conventions together with all the artistry of a maintenance check. Designed for an efficient streaming experience, The Fountain of Youth was produced to iron out any wrinkle of style that risks giving the film any personality. This is made most evident by its director, Guy Ritchie.

While Ritchie’s style has never personally interested me, he’s certainly earned his place as one of the most recognizable action directors today. Quick-witted characters and flashy, jagged set pieces defined Ritchie’s scrappy early career and heralded such classics as Snatch, Sherlock Holmes, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Even in his less commercially successful films, you can always pick out the Guy Ritchie in a Guy Ritchie film. However, in The Fountain of Youth, the only trace of Guy Ritchie is his name appearing in the credits. Each scene serves nothing but a narrative beat, not wasting any of its runtime on such frivolities as effective humor and proper emotional stakes. Ritchie seems to take a regressive step back, abandoning his offbeat style for direction that values efficiency over emotion. Any semblance of style has been drained, leaving behind a film that feels so cold it becomes inhuman. From the lighting to the costume design, every element of the film that should be bursting with personality has been strained and filtered into a faint whisper. Whatever talent there was behind the camera must’ve been separated from the lens by 10 feet of Apple bureaucracy and production notes.

The cast feels similarly encumbered by the meddling hands of the streaming giant. Once again, Apple TV+ advertising seeps into the film and actors merely stand in place to remind the audience that your eyes do not deceive you, John Krasinski and Natalie Portman are indeed there. There’s no real allure in their performances other than the fact that they’re on the screen. Their lack of chemistry as siblings is certainly evident, but it hardly stands out because the cast is already so muted. It’s hard to pick out what’s bad and what’s good (if there is anything you could call good). Dialogue can be separated into two pieces, exposition, and reaction to exposition, and both are delivered with the same bland predictability.

The Fountain of Youth, despite its promises of star-studded grandeur, spectacularly fails as an adventure film. And while you can point to any number of suspects for its many failings, the main culprit is glaringly obvious – there’s no excitement. The stakes exist purely to carry the plot to the next necessary moment. Set pieces are treated as chores instead of opportunities to use a near unlimited budget to create something spectacular. Like a routine inspection of a rusty old machine, once every piece is functioning at the bare minimum it’s time to move on. Its success isn’t measured by creating a rousing experience, it’s measured by how fast it can check off every box on adventure filmmaking 101.

From the moment it was announced, it was abundantly clear that the most important part of The Fountain of Youth is the credits. So instead of a film that explores a genre teeming with potential, we get 2 hours of half-hearted distraction and trite storytelling until we can be reminded that Apple has your favorite stars and filmmakers locked in some Faustian pact where they’ve exchanged their creative souls for some big tech bucks.