johnke.meFountain of Youth
Fountain of Youth isn’t so much a direct Indiana Jones rip-off, it’s Indiana Jones filtered through forty years of copycats. It’s a copy of a copy of a copy. The half-tuck henley shirt from the Uncharted games. The moment where the mystery is solved by the last likely member of the team, taken directly from National Treasure. You could literally pick apart every element of this film and find its antecedent in earlier films or videogames. It’s a film put together like a shopping list.
Not that this is, by itself, a bad thing. Indiana Jones was a tribute to the Republic serials of the 30s, and some of its set-pieces are lifted wholesale from those. Like the truck chase with Indiana Jones going under the truck is a combination of similar gags in Zorro’s Fighting Legion and Stagecoach. But Fountain of Youth fails to be anything more than a hodgepodge of reference is because it completely misses any of the emotional beats that draw us into film. The emotional beats that allow us to overlook the seams in the plot construction.
And this is down to two main problems, as I see it.
The first is that there are just too many characters that do absolutely nothing. Even Natalie Portman, the apparent second lead, has little to do apart from to be a foil for John Krazinsky’s witty banter (is it banter when its just one person who gets literally all the good lines?). She’s a capable actor but she’s the Basil Exposition of this film, just there to say the things that helps move us to the next sequence. Laz Alonso and Carmen Ejogo were also in this film, I guess, but for what? Maybe two lines each? Get that bag MM, but yikes your character could have been wallpaper for all we learned about you. Stanley Tucci appears for two minutes to be the guy who says things just for the trailer. And the extent of Domhnall Gleeson’s character development is a single cough to indicate his terminal illness. What are his motivations? Not sure! So if he turns out to be the bad guy (or doesn’t), I don’t really care! We’re given nothing to invest in him as a character.
The other problem affecting Fountain of Youth is one that I feel also contributed to the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull-hate. When everything is CGI and it lets you do anything, nothing makes sense, so we’re left just throwing our hands in the air and shouting “I GUESS??!” I leave my lawnmower in the shed all winter and when I take it out again, I have to oil the blades to get them spinning nicely. But an enormous 200-foot tall precision mechanism shoving thousands of tons of rocks into a complicated stair system buried under the pyramids that hasn’t been touched in 5,000 years? No problem! CGI allows filmmakers to set their films in incredible places, allows their camera to do impossible movements, regardless of how illogical they might be. And who cares about dramatic or emotional stakes when CGI artists can literally paint around your un-affected movements? People make the big jump at the last second because that’s what the CGI artists made it look like. When Yakima Canutt is dragged under horses in Stagecoach or Vic Armstrong is pulled behind the truck in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s thrilling because there’s a real person performing it.
On their own, nither one of these problems is enough to really sink a film. But taken together, it just leaves me feeling like what’s the fuckin point? When you’ve got me looking back fondly on National Treasure 2 (of all films), you’ve really shit the bed.
What an enormous waste of money.