Fountain of Youth (2025)
Spoilers, because this movie is not worth your time
The US Constitution was written in the 1700s.
There are scholarly debates on what the Founding Fathers intended, including the discussion around a particular comma, for a document written in the same language as the current tongue.
That’s a document that’s under 250 years old! Not even a quarter-millennium!
Now: show me a job/role/position that has remained exactly the same for the last 250 years.
Musical instruments have changed shape and material, comedic roles and positions have shifted, and entire governments and countries have risen and collapsed.
Not even the role of Catholic priest – tied to the 2000 year-old Catholic Church and Holy See – is immutable, as the advent of Vatican II in 1965 that changed how Mass was conducted, let alone how societal norms and expectations for priests have evolved.
How, then, could anyone interpret the exact meanings of scribblings that are almost 5000 years old? How could any organization host an unchanging job series for approximately half as long as human society has been a thing?!
Well: according to “The Fountain of Youth” (2025), the Fountain of Youth does actually exist, has been known about since the age of the Pharaohs, and is buried hundreds of meters below the Pyramid of Menkaure (the smallest of the three big ones in Giza).
And parallel to the fount being known of, there’s an ambiguous organization called “The Protectors” (that may or may not be controlled by the Vatican), who’s sole purpose is to spend eternity hiring mortals to prevent other mortals from finding the fountain.
***
I watched this movie with friends, and I realized I really can’t turn my brain off.
Whatever piece of my grey-matter that’s supposed to shut down and let me melt into suspension of disbelief simply isn’t triggering.
I get it. It’s a movie.
It’s just for entertainment and it’s not real, and theoretically, I should just be able to accept that whatever’s happening in any given movie makes sense contextually in that world.
But I can’t. And I don’t.
When the key macguffin is “there’s a mythical wellspring of immortality that no one has ever seen or heard of, and there are not other established magical items in this world, so we should go find that water!”
I simply cannot buy in.
That’s as serious a premise as “no, seriously, the moon is totally made of cheese! Let’s go take a fondue bath!”
When cancer-stricken billionaire Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson) reached out to disgraced archaeologist Luke Purdue (John Krasinski) with a blank check, Luke should have taken the money, made up an elaborate easter-egg hunt, and then disappeared into the sunset with his sweet, sweet cash while Owen died in an oncology ward.
There were absolutely zero references to other supernatural material or events in the movie, and for Luke to fully buy into Owen’s idea implied that he had the same capacity to separate fiction from reality as my toddlers. He probably also checks under his bed for monsters and keeps trying to catch The Tooth Fairy with a butterfly net.
At least in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), Indy was already an established professor/archaeologist/grave robber, and the Nazis were Nazis, so doing anything to impede them was simply the right thing to do; the fact that the Ark was actually magical was tangential.
Of course, once Indy (and the audience) realized that the Ark had powers, anything supernatural in the series became fair game, regardless of how bad any sequels were.
Anyway.
Owen paid Luke an unknown (but obscene) amount of money to find a fictional fountain, and Luke agreed because billionaires are well known to be moral, compassionate people with nothing to hide and nothing but the best intentions for mankind as a while.
Later, Luke’s sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman) even asked what Owen’s plan was after he was cured of his everything-cancer, and Luke brushed it off as if it wasn’t something to worry about.
Weird choice, considering everything that’s going on in the world with billionaires right now.
So Luke, Owen, Charlotte, and Luke’s entirely useless and forgettable team of Deb (Carmen Ejogo) and Murph (Laz Alonso) set out to find the fountain.
Immediately they were interrupted by INTERPOL Inspector Jamal Abbas (Arian Moayed) who was after the team for global art thievery.
They escaped, of course, or we would have been spared the rest of this tripe.
Why were Luke and co. stealing artwork around the world, you ask?
Because in the 1600s, six separate artists all learned about the Fountain of Youth and decided to hide 1/6th of their knowledge across six different paintings, so that when you collected the half-dozen pieces of art, they clues would Voltron into… a constellation?
Remember earlier when I mentioned “The Protectors”?
Yeah.
What the fuck have they been doing for the last 5000 years?
This was an organization whose one and only reason to exist was to stop people from finding the fountain. If the Protectors had been doing their jobs, how did six different people learn about it? Why would they each want to hide a piece of information in their paintings? And why wouldn’t the Protectors have found and destroyed said paintings? And who was paying the living costs of The Protectors for five thousand years?
2025’s lead Protector, Esme (Eiza Gonzalez) kept showing up wherever Luke and his party were. Not before, to stop him from finding the clues, nor with legitimately murderous intent to stop the team in its tracks.
Nope.
Esme worked with all the strength and impact of a strongly worded letter from Congress to a sitting President.
Of course, the script tried to make a romantic undercurrent between Luke and Esme whenever they’d interact, but it really just felt like director Guy Ritchie said “Hey, these two people are attractive, lets get them to hook up!”
***
It turned out that the six points weren’t points at all, but led the team to a bible in Vienna that happened to have markings on the edge that corresponded to a musical octave, the notes of which somehow identified the geographic locations of the seven wonders of the world, which is especially impressive because no one is exactly sure where some of them were.
From there, the team inexplicably deduced that the Great Pyramids of Giza were the key location, and that specifically the Pyramid of Menkaure was the one tomb worth digging into. The in-movie explanation was that extra sonar scans had revealed more buried/hidden chambers, which… yeah, all of the pyramids had those. Like a lot of them. That’s how the ancient Egyptian priests and engineers tried to confuse the grave robbers of antiquity.
Clearly that’s how the plot needed the discovery to go; the characters would have been completely S.O.L. if the Fountain of Youth had been used to water the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Obviously, the team made it into the pyramid and down into the heretofore undiscovered chamber, which led to a puzzle requiring impossible physics to solve, and that led down to another puzzle, then down to the fountain itself.
There was a LOT of down in their process. While the ancient Egyptian engineers made some truly incredible temples and tombs, they didn’t moonlight as dwarves.
Surprising literally no one, it turns out that Owen wasn’t dying of cancer at all, and instead wanted to bottle the fountain of youth to sell it.
Bold choice, considering they thought it would cleanse all ailments and then provide eternal life.
Why would a billionaire want to make a bunch of immortal people?!
Then the one sane part of this movie happened: it was revealed that the fountain’s blessing was a double-edged sword.
Anyone who drank from it would gain eternal life by absorbing the life-force of those they loved.
Anyone who drank from it and was a malignant narcissist would create a feedback loop into themselves and explode.
Investigator Abbas and Esme arrived just in time to watch Owen explode.
Then, because this movie was clearly a failed Indiana Jones script, the innards of this temple started collapsing, forcing everyone to rush out.
And once outside, they just… left?
Abbas, who had spent the entire movie chasing down Luke for actual, serious crimes, just walked away. Luke was still an art thief, but suddenly Abbas didn’t care, because the script declared it wasn’t important anymore.
Esme, who apparently decided she’d fulfilled her role of “protecting” the fountain, made a flirty comment at Luke and walked away too, presumably back to the Vatican to see The Elder (Stanley Tucci) for another 19 seconds.
There were countless unforced errors in this movie, many of them could have been instantly solved with very minor script changes.
First: this was clearly written for Charlotte and Luke to be exes, not brother and sister. Their rapport was too spiteful to be explained by siblings who simply drifted apart with time, and the D-plot of Charlotte’s divorce proved to be entirely unimportant; the custody battle with her ex-husband leading to the inclusion of her son into the quest would have made infinitely more sense if she had being suckered back into her ex-husband’s exotic life of globe-trotting shenanigans after she’d left him to protect said kid.
Second: make The Protectors all of the people from throughout the last 5000 years who drank from the fountain. Then their motivation to stop others from drinking would be “guys, this is terrible, stop finding it.” Kinda like what we saw in “The Old Guard” (2020). It absolutely didn’t make sense that normal, mortal humans would be on board with this role.
Third: the fountain was far too hidden to be a concern. It needed to be out in the open where someone could just stumble upon it, which would justify The Protectors existing at all.
Four: there needed to be literally anything else supernatural in the world that Luke or Owen or a newspaper headline alluded to. Otherwise Owen was funding an expedition that was about as logical as snorting copper shavings to cure diarrhea.
The special effects for this were acceptable. There were a few chase scenes and some explosions. Nothing looked out of place.
The music was…
Apparently so bland and uninteresting that I don’t even remember it playing. Not a great sign.
I don’t know who Apple has on staff for their various AppleTV+ products.
Whoever is running their shows and scripted drama division is knocking it out of the park with everything from “For All Mankind” (2019+) to “Your Friends & Neighbors” (2025+).
Meanwhile, whoever is in charge of picking movies has clearly never actually seen a movie before, and might be legally blind and deaf. Otherwise I don’t know how we keep getting trash like “Luck” (2022), “Sharper” (2023), or whatever this was.
If you want to watch an Indiana Jones-style artifact heist with mystic shenanigans, watch Indiana Jones (1981, 1989), or “The Mummy” (1999).
If you really want to sink into your couch and absorb the genre, watch “The Librarians” (2014-2018).
This was the second movie I reviewed about the fabled fountain. Clearly it is not a piece of lore that wants to be told.
1 Claw for wasting my time and having more holes than Swiss cheese.
