With Fountain Of Youth, Apple TV+ Has Finally Made Its First Netflix Movie (And That's Not A Good Thing)

At first glance, "Fountain of Youth," Guy Ritchie's new action-adventure film made for Apple TV+, looks like a fun, family-friendly romp about an intrepid explorer and thief named Luke Purdue (John Krasinski), who recruits his sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman) to join him on a quest to find the mythical "fountain of youth." Joined by Charlotte's son Thomas (Benjamin Chivers), a billionaire seeking the fountain to cure his terminal cancer named Owen Carter (Domhnall Gleeson), Luke's old accomplices Deb McCall and Patrick Murphy (Carmen Egojo and Laz Alonso), and a competing explorer/thief named Esme (Eiza González) who keeps tracking Luke, they all set out to find the fountain that's been mentioned across continents and cultures for centuries.

This sounds at least a little promising. The end result is anything but. "Fountain of Youth" is a slog that stretches for 2 hours and 5 interminable minutes, stranding Krasinski, Portman, Gleeson, and all the rest of these actors in exotic locales without anything to do and armed with some of the worst dialogue you've ever heard in your life. (Ejogo and Alonso do escape the worst of it because they're barely even a part of the action, such as it is; this turns out to be a blessing in disguise for both of them.) This glossy, presumably expensive, large-scale movie shot on location in Vienna, Ireland, and Thailand, could have had a great sense of fun or adventure, but instead, the whole venture feels like it's filling out some sort of checklist of "stuff that happens in action heist movies." (Shootout? Check! A police officer hot on the protagonist's trail, this time played by "Succession" standout Arian Moayed? Check! A mythical artifact that can only be wielded by the pure of heart? Check!)

The problem here is that Apple TV+ typically makes ... decent stuff? Even some of their fluffier fare, like the 2024 romantic comedy "Fly Me To the Moon," isn't terrible, and not for nothing, this is the streamer and studio behind "Killers of the Flower Moon." Unfortunately, Apple TV+ just made their first "Netflix movie," and that is a bad sign of things to come.

I'm not going to sit here and say that Netflix has never made or championed a truly great film exclusive to its platform. Movies like "Roma," "Hit Man," and even rom-com fare like "Set It Up" would all prove that statement wrong immediately. With that said, N+1 released a massive report on the internal workings of Netflix and revealed that, after years of supporting independent film didn't necessarily pay off in the way that executives hoped or expected, folks like Ted Sarandos started creating a new kind of "movie" which I'll simply refer to as a "Netflix movie." You know what I'm talking about. "Red Notice." "The Gray Man." Films like 2024's "A Family Affair" and 2025's "Back in Action" premiere on the streamer and never made any sort of impact, even though Nicole Kidman stars in the former and Cameron Diaz took a break from her permanent acting hiatus to appear in the latter.

In that N+1 report, Will Tavlin writes that a source at Netflix told him that in-house screenwriters who work on the platform's original content are told to "have this character announce what they're doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along." (Tavlin uses a particularly clunky exchange from Lindsay Lohan's dreadful rom-com "Irish Wish" as an example, but this is, I strongly suspect, the case in "Fountain of Youth" as well.) Elsewhere in the article, a major producer was pretty blunt with Tavlin about Netflix's near-constant rollout of its original movies. "What are these movies?" the Hollywood producer apparently asked Tavlin. "Are they successful movies? Are they not? They have famous people in them. They get put out by major studios. And yet because we don't have any reliable numbers from the streamers, we actually don't know how many people have watched them. So what are they?"

Netflix's insatiable need to create content, without worrying about silly things like "artistic merit," is exhausting enough when it's confined to one streaming service. We don't need this scourge to spread to other streams. Apple TV+ shouldn't be in the "background noise" business, and it sucks that it's apparently jumping on the bandwagon.

I actually almost couldn't believe how unremarkable, deeply forgettable, and frankly lame "Fountain of Youth" was when I watched it. I'm a person who is, generally, skeptical of John Krasinski as an action star, but even his signature charm is missing from this movie; Natalie Portman, who won an Oscar, is almost as dreadful as she was in the "Star Wars" prequels. It's not even the fault of either Krasinski or Portman, though; everyone is bad in this movie (even Stanley Tucci, who got roped into a roughly two-minute scene that appears to take place in Italy; maybe he phoned this in during a break on "Conclave?"). It's probably because they're saddled with some of, again, the worst and most clunky dialogue I've experienced in a while. After Portman's Charlotte has encountered Luke's sexy, brash shadow Esme and Luke later describes a prior run-in with the mysterious woman, Charlotte says to her brother, "When you say run-in, do you mean that weird, dysfunctional chemistry you two had going on?" Luke responds, "When you say chemistry, do you mean attraction?"

"I'm now a fugitive of justice. Luckily, my son is now with me on the lam," Charlotte later says while she's drunk on Owens' private plane. Shortly after that, she describes her husband as having "all the qualities of a dog," at which point Luke wonders if he could "lick his own..." (Charlotte cuts him off and drags this crappy joke down even more by saying her husband didn't have the "loyalty" of a dog.) In that same scene, Charlotte presses Luke about why he wants to find the fountain in the first place, and he lamely opines:

"Dad. Recognition. He deserves it. He didn't insist upon it, but I will. After what he achieved? The world owes it to him. And our family name deserves to be revered."

"I don't need reverence. Dad certainly doesn't need reverence, because he's dead," Charlotte responds blithely. We've already been told, about twenty different times, that their explorer dad is dead, but I guess director Guy Ritchie and screenwriter James Vanderbilt were worried we all developed amnesia or sustained a head injury during this film. Yes, I'm dunking on this movie a lot. It's just that ... the world doesn't need another "Red Notice" or "The Gray Man" or, frankly, another "Fountain of Youth." Apple TV+, please don't become Netflix! You guys make "Severance!" Don't squander all of that good will!

"Fountain of Youth" is streaming on Apple TV+ now, but as you may have gathered, I do not recommend it.