Fountain of Youth review — Natalie Portman and John Krasinski play bickering siblings in Guy Ritchie’s action-adventure

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The movies are in trouble, but Guy Ritchie just keeps rolling. While gifted filmmakers twiddle their thumbs, Ritchie (Sherlock Holmes, The Gentlemen) has seemingly never been busier, making a rash of recent projects funded by Netflix and Amazon. Now Apple too has joined the party with Fountain of Youth, a knockabout action-adventure starring Natalie Portman and John Krasinski.

In a small departure from expectations, the pair don’t play a bickering couple but bickering siblings. Portman is an upright curator at London’s National Portrait Gallery; Krasinski an art thief of Indiana Jones-ish bent. He in turn has been hired to find the legend of the title, a task for which his sister is coaxed along for the ride.

Your own quest may be working out why Ritchie is directing, given his signature brand remains the effortfully lairy British geezer caper. The answer is his sideline in far more polite family-friendly romps. Witness Aladdin (2019), whose $1bn gross at the box office is still enough to see him trusted here with a budget that stretches to shoots in Bangkok, Vienna and Egypt. (Though that may not be the actual wreck of the sunken ocean liner Lusitania.)

Most of the personality comes from the script, where a light-hearted riff on The Da Vinci Code is heavily seasoned by writer James Vanderbilt. It proves a mixed blessing. “I wouldn’t dare be mendacious with an officer dressed in that houndstooth,” Portman says, which she can’t have seen coming when winning a Best Actress Oscar for Black Swan.

And Ritchie? As the movie lurches forward, he keeps his usual pranky camerawork on a tight leash. Only now and then does a car chase end in a long frantic spin to queasy effect, before the film settles back into its default mode — somehow both wholly undemanding and completely exhausting. 

★★☆☆☆

On Apple TV+ from May 23