Fountain of Youth

In Guy Ritchie’s “Fountain of Youth,” archaeologist cum treasure hunter Luke Purdue (John Krasinski) recruits, nay, semi-extorts his museum curator sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman) into helping him locate the mystical eponymous eternal life-giving water source. Bankrolled by Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), a tech billionaire who is dying of cancer (or is he?), their globe-trotting quest is threatened not only by Interpol but by Esme (Eiza González) and the Protectors of the Path, a secret society entrusted to safeguard the Fountain’s location lest idiot humanity be able to harness its awesome power. These details suggest “Indiana Jones,” of course, but specifically “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade” while the map to the mystical fountain being located on the back of various Rembrandt paintings evokes “National Treasure.” Ritchie, however, cannot imbue the same sense of awe as Steven Spielberg while Krasinski is just a little too in on the joke to impart the same sort of crucial zany-eyed earnestness as Nicolas Cage following a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

That’s not to rule “Fountain of Youth” entirely out of order. Ritchie keeps a blistering pace, opening with an action scene on the streets of Thailand and then segueing right into another action scene on a train and then segueing right into another action scene at the National Gallery in London. These scenes tend to be more amusing than thrilling, underscored in Ritchie’s agreeably fluid camera, putting the action-packed puzzle in a way to underline Luke’s spur of the moment problem solving. I especially liked his riding the motorbike onto the train platform and right up to the train, as if it were a motorized horse in an old western. The problem is, despite this larger-than-life adventure, James Vanderbilt’s screenplay connects the dots with too little panache, and Ritchie imparts no sense of discovery nor wonder.

This is a movie that makes raising the freaking Lusitania (part of it, anyway) ho-hum. Luke is reduced to literally observing that they are first people to board the doomed ship in decades because Ritchie cannot live that line through his moviemaking. When Luke and Charlotte step inside they may as well be walking through the front door of some newly constructed McMansion in Destin, Florida. The Fountain of Youth itself, meanwhile, proves less a moving Lucas Cranach the Elder painting than akin to the computer-generated gloom with which “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” conveyed the same legendary spring. It all just reinforces my belief that when it comes to cinema, at least, CGI is too often a crutch that impedes imagination rather than unleashing it.

Carver is a potentially interesting character, reconfiguring the evil N*zis of “Indiana Jones” as a selfish technocrat posing as your best friend, but Gleeson never brings that idea to life with real relish. As Esme, González has nothing real to do and her chemistry with Krasinski never sizzles because Krasinski’s part and performance are stranded somewhere between Brendan Fraser and John Hannah of “The Mummy,” playing an annoying brother more than a dashing romantic lead. When Luke prattles on to Charlotte about seeking adventure in your life, it sounds less like a call to action than a smug dismissal of the life she has built for herself. Charlotte’s yo-yoing between wanting to go home and wanting to go after the fountain feels too much like confused writing, but Portman, at least, cagily plays to that confusion by rendering a true sibling relationship. One minute, Charlotte can’t stand her brother and the next, she loves him to pieces, the two feuding in these arrestingly exact, erudite sentences that kept making me tilt my head at the screen like a dog whose just heard an oddball noise it can’t quite place. That’s a welcomingly weird vibe for a would-be summer blockbuster. I can’t claim it saves “Fountain of Youth,” but a faint pulse is better than none.