Action-packed ‘Fountain of Youth’ has everything — except a soul

When Hollywood finally masters artificial intelligence — assuming the technology hasn’t destroyed us all by then — you can expect a lot of results like “Fountain of Youth,” a movie that’s acceptably entertaining and completely soulless.

There are actual humans behind this globe-trotting action-adventure, an Apple original streaming now on Apple TV+, among them director Guy Ritchie (“Snatch,” “Sherlock Holmes,”), screenwriter James Vanderbilt (“Zodiac”) and stars John Krasinski and Natalie Portman.

“Fountain of Youth” looks good and moves well; it’s nothing if not a professional piece of work. But it’s also what you would get if you fed the following prompts into the movie version of ChatGPT: “National Treasure,” “The Da Vinci Code,” “Romancing the Stone,” that Tom Cruise “Mummy” movie and all five installments of the Indiana Jones franchise.

Is there anything wrong with that? Not if you need to pacify the kids for a couple of hours or have a lazy Sunday with absolutely nothing else going on. Still, your response to “Fountain of Youth” may be purely Pavlovian, so familiar are its story beats, shootouts, special effects and dialogue.

Krasinski plays raffish archaeologist Luke Purdue, first seen stealing an Old Master painting from a Thai gangster and leading a lot of extras on a hectic chase through Bangkok. Then it’s off to London and the National Gallery, where Luke’s sister Charlotte (Portman) is a curator until big brother relieves her of her job by stealing another painting and going on another high-speed chase around Trafalgar Square.

It turns out that six Renaissance artworks hold clues to the whereabouts of the legendary Fountain of Youth, and Luke and his two teammates (Laz Alonso and Carmen Ejogo) have been hired to find it by Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), a bajillionaire who’s dying of cancer and hoping for a Hail Mary healing. Charlotte comes along for the ride because Luke knows the spirit of their late treasure-hunting father still lurks inside her.

From there it’s on to Vienna, Cairo and a particular spot off the coast of Ireland, each destination holding the next piece of the puzzle. Close on the heels of our heroes are a resourceful Interpol detective (Arian Moayed of “Succession”) and a woman (Eiza González) with MMA fighting skills, ties to an ancient society and an on-again, off-again flirtation with Luke. The locations are swank, whether real or digitized, and each sequence ends with a busy action donnybrook and the rattle of automatic gunfire.

“Fountain of Youth” is what you get when people who are good at their jobs make something utterly lacking in inspiration. It’s the very definition of “content.” The cast is likable, and the actors do what they can with dialogue that is either explanatory boilerplate, arrant cliché or just plain bad.

So why does this get a just-above-average star rating? Because it’s a movie designed as functional entertainment, and for lack of a better word it functions.

This is an excerpt from a Washington Post story.