For every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. On the same weekend when Tom Cruise & Co. are defying death on the big screen, Guy Ritchie’s Fountain of Youth wasn’t even given the decency of a one-week theatrical run, and has been relegated to the AppleTV+ streamer. Whereas Christopher McQuarrie seeks to redefine action spectacle, Ritchie’s film never distinguishes itself as anything more than a clone of films like National Treasure or the Dan Brown/Robert Langdon series.

Sure, Ritchie has had a recent stint with Netflix, but he’s amassed a solid fanbase (of which I admittedly do not belong) who turn up for his theatrical releases. Regardless, it doesn’t feel like Apple is leaving much money on the table, because Fountain of Youth is just another uninspired, inoffensive genre flick which mostly wastes the talents of its cast. Perhaps it’s easy to give the film a soft pass for being something to have on in the background while, say, watching the Pacers in the Eastern Conference Finals. But it’s a sad reminder of the state of the film industry in 2025 when a bankable director with A-list talent attached will see no return on investment, regardless of the quality of the film.

Ritchie’s film, from James Vanderbilt’s script, utilizes the same pseudo-science and elastic history as the aforementioned films to go on a globe-trotting search for the titular Fountain of Youth. The film kicks off with a car chase in Bangkok, as Luke Purdue (John Krasinski), an Indiana Jones-type, evades the bad guys to smuggle a painting. He soon reunites and recruits his estranged sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman), a museum curator in London who reluctantly joins despite a contentious divorce and her piano prodigy son Thomas (Benjamin Chivers). Luke’s benefactor is billionaire Owen Carver (Domhall Gleeson), who seeks the Fountain because he’s supposedly dying of cancer.

It’s essentially pointless to recount Fountain of Youth‘s convoluted path across exotic locations, from Thailand to the sunken wreckage of the RMS Lusitania to Egypt, as Luke and Charlotte try to dodge Esme (Eiza González) and her team of disposables. She’s the leader of an ancient group tasked with protecting the Fountain, of course. None of the players here feels particularly out of their depths; Krasinski has proven himself a chameleonic genre star, and Portman has the Oscar chops to make Vanderbilt’s schlocky dialogue work.

Exciting action set pieces are Guy Ritchie’s bread and butter, and the film has a number of sequences, mostly hand-to-hand combat and chase sequences. There’s a veritable heft to many of these scenes, where it actually feels like the film was at least shot outside, and not on a vacuum-packed soundstage. Stunt-wise, nothing within Fountain of Youth holds a candle to recent stand-outs like The Fall Guy or even Rebel Ridge, but it’s enough to get through the repetitive and increasingly ludicrous lore dumps.

We all have leaps of faith that occupy our attentions, either briefly or for more extended periods. Like El Dorado, the Holy Grail, and more, the idea of the Fountain of Youth has been a fascination of mankind for centuries, a belief that some magic may exist in some undiscovered pocket of the world. So why is it so difficult to imbue Fountain of Youth with the same level of wonder?

Fountain of Youth will be available to stream on AppleTV+ on May 23.

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