A treasure-hunting mastermind assembles a team for a life-changing adventure. But to outwit and outrun threats at every turn, he'll need someone even smarter than he is: his estranged sister.
17 Jun Fountain of Youth (2025)
Architecture
Under normal circumstances, I would warn you away from this. It is an unintegrated collection of elements designed to take a few dollars and hours in exchange for an escape. It supposes to triangulate that zone among ‘Indiana Jones’, ‘National Treasure’, and ‘The DaVinci Code’. Maybe because of daddy issues throw in ’Tomb Raider.’
Plot points are fabulated to set up effects and evoke celestial conspiracy. Action set pieces include several varieties of chase, location, and exotica.
Why not completely trash this? Because it involves two major talents that I admire. Portman has been around great filmmakers and has learned to adapt to their inner vision. While I found Black Swan life altering, her craft is better seen in films that don’t quite work but have vision, like with Malick and Kar-Wai.
And Ritchie! Now don’t laugh. He does some execrable things, but when he envisions a situation, ‘writes’ it then brings it to life he has no match. Often these are annotated action scenes or before the action — even preventing or teasing action. And he does so by cajoling actors to be strange.
So we have these two. There’s little room for the collaboration I’m looking for. You can see hints from time to time. Neither is fully invested; they were hired to do a job apart from their strengths. And both are embarrassed. How could a minor but pretty actress (González) outclass her with screen presence?
But you can see it in the first chase, which I assume was the first sequence filmed. So, pretty thin value to see hints of what could have been. But evocative enough.
Posted in 2025
Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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