Spoiler Warning: If you haven't seen Fountain of Youth yet and want to experience its full "treasure hunt meets console cutscene" glory without knowing exactly when John Krasinski will deploy his patented "sad eyes," stop reading now. If you have seen it… well, I’m about to disassemble it.

Remember when HBO ruled the premium content universe with what we affectionately called "dragon money"? Those were simpler times. Now Apple has entered the arena, wielding its iPhone fortune like a credit card with no limit, producing content that screams "prestige" while somehow missing the memo on what actually makes something prestigious. Enter Fountain of Youth, Guy Ritchie's latest globe-trotting adventure that desperately wants to be Indiana Jones, borrows its puzzle mechanics from National Treasure, lifts its aesthetic from Tomb Raider, and somehow manages to feel exactly like someone stitched together all the cutscenes from a mid-tier Xbox adventure game and called it cinema.

The movie follows Luke and Charlotte Purdue (John Krasinski and Natalie Portman), wealthy siblings who inherit their father's estate along with, apparently, two highly competent people of color who serve as their support staff. If that sentence made you uncomfortable, congratulations on having a functioning moral compass. We'll get to that particular disaster shortly.

Luke Purdue rides entirely on John Krasinski's residual goodwill from The Office, deploying Jim Halpert's puckish charm like it's the only arrow in his quiver. His emotional range consists of two settings: "charming rogue grin" and "looking down with sad eyes while dramatic music swells." There's a dream sequence where he gazes at shiny objects with the kind of wonder usually reserved for toddlers discovering Christmas lights, and that's about as deep as this particular well goes.

Charlotte Purdue, despite Natalie Portman's best efforts, functions primarily as an angry exposition delivery system wrapped in designer archaeological gear. She hand-delivers plot points with all the subtlety of a FedEx driver who really needs you to sign for this package right now. The script gives her moments that suggest depth, but they evaporate faster than water in the Sahara, leaving us with a character who exists solely to explain why we're in this particular exotic location solving this particular ancient puzzle and why Jim-Luke is NOT her father.

Then there's the curious case of what I'm calling the Chekhov's Cloak Incident. Early in the film, Charlotte and an Interpol detective (whose name is so forgettable I'm convinced it was procedurally generated) engage in what seems like important banter about his Sherlock Holmes-inspired houndstooth cloak. The camera lingers. The music suggests significance. This is clearly going somewhere, right? Wrong. The cloak vanishes from the narrative entirely, never to be mentioned again. The same detective later shows up in Egypt wearing a three-piece wool suit that would make anyone sweat just looking at it, but nobody comments on this sartorial disaster either. It's like the script was written by someone who kept starting sentences and then forgetting what they were talking about halfway through.

Let's address the elephant in the pyramid, shall we? Murph (Laz Alonso) and Deb (Carmen Ejogo) are introduced as having been essentially inherited from the dead patriarch. Not hired. Not partners. Inherited. Like a vintage car collection or the good china. These two highly skilled professionals drive getaway vehicles, operate sophisticated tech interfaces, and plant perfectly calibrated explosive charges with surgical precision. Their reward for this expertise? Being consistently told to "wait outside" while the white heroes explore ancient temples and solve puzzles that apparently require a very specific melanin deficiency to complete.

The colonial undertones here aren't subtle; they're wearing a neon sign that says "PROBLEMATIC" while doing the Chicken Dance. Even when the climax erupts into what can only be described as a military-scale firefight at the Great Pyramid of Giza, our two most competent characters are benched harder than a rookie quarterback with the yips. They're the cinematic equivalent of those video game NPCs who give you quest items and exposition but mysteriously cannot enter the dungeon themselves because of an invisible wall only the player character can cross.

Owen Carver, our billionaire oligarch antagonist, feels less like a character and more like someone asked ChatGPT to generate "generic action movie villain" and hit enter. He owns yachts and jets and apparently runs a global empire, yet somehow operates without any visible staff, security detail, or media scrutiny. At one point, he pops a single pill to remind us he has terminal cancer, a plot point that's mentioned exactly once and then abandoned like a rest stop bathroom.

His first truly villainous act? Ordering the removal of the only person of color from the pyramid excavation site so he can personally jackhammer his way into the MacGuffin Chamber of Secrets. When he inevitably betrays our heroes in the finale, Jim-Luke might as well have shouted "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!" It's a betrayal so telegraphed that Western Union called to say it was too obvious.

Remember Thomas? No? That's understandable, because the movie introduces this 11-year-old piano prodigy early on and then apparently forgets he exists for about an hour. When he returns, though, he's somehow gained plot-specific superpowers that would make any RPG player cry "hacks!" He instantly recognizes a seven-note musical code that multiple adult experts have missed, despite it being what any first-year music theory student would recognize as a basic harmonic progression.

But wait, it gets better. In the film's most video game moment yet, Thomas expertly plays handpan drums to unlock a secret door in an allegedly untouched pyramid chamber. The handpan, for those keeping track at home, was invented around the year 2000. In Switzerland. The pyramid? Built roughly 4,500 years ago. In…it cannot be stressed enough…Egypt But sure, ancient Egyptians definitely programmed their security systems to respond to an instrument that wouldn't exist for several millennia. This is the exact moment where the movie forces you to play as the child sidekick character that nobody asked for, complete with a rhythm mini-game that determines whether you can progress to the next level.

This movie operates entirely on video game rules, and not in a clever, self-aware way that might actually be entertaining. We progress through exotic locations like we're unlocking new areas on a world map, with exactly one puzzle per set piece that's always solved just in time to trigger the next cutscene. The Thai market sequence features a full-scale machine gun battle that the local vendors treat with the same level of concern as a light drizzle. Bodies fly, bullets spray, fruit stands explode, and yet commerce continues unabated. I've seen NPCs in Grand Theft Auto show more awareness of their surroundings.

The film's pièce de résistance of implausibility involves raising the Lusitania from the ocean floor. Yes, that Lusitania. One of the most famous shipwrecks in human history. Our heroes accomplish this feat in broad daylight, in full view of presumably hundreds of witnesses, and then proceed to loot it like it's a treasure chest in Assassin's Creed. The global response to this unprecedented archaeological discovery and blatant grave robbing? Complete radio silence. Not even a strongly worded tweet. James Cameron didn't even show up to complain about historical accuracy, and that man appears wherever shipwrecks can be found only via one-man submersibles. That’s not to mention how fast they managed to pull this whole operation together, complete with a dive team, submersibles, and support ships. It is the kind of operation that would have taken years of planning, coordinating, getting permits, not to mention the specific training and practice for the personnel involved.

The Interpol subplot deserves special mention for its commitment to absolute nonsense. Our heroes are supposedly wanted criminals across multiple continents, yet they board flights, clear customs, and file flight plans with their real names. It's like watching someone play a stealth game with god mode enabled. They're not dodging authorities; the authorities have simply agreed to look the other way because the plot demands it.

The film doesn't so much end as it does pause for a commercial break that never ends. The final scene features our surviving characters essentially winking at the camera while discussing "more adventures," setting up Fountain of Youth 2: The Quicktime Event Rises with all the subtlety of a pop-up ad for a mobile game you definitely don't want to play. Thomas, Esme, the detective with the inexplicably absent cloak, and our protagonist siblings form what I can only describe as the world's least interesting adventuring party, ready to tackle whatever contrived historical conspiracy the writers room can cobble together from Wikipedia articles and rejected Dan Brown manuscripts.

Here's the truly depressing part: they're absolutely going to make another one. Apple has iPhone money to burn, and they're determined to spend it on establishing themselves as a prestige content creator, even if that content has all the prestige of a direct-to-DVD sequel from 2003. With a reported budget north of $200 million, they could have created something original, something daring, something that justified its existence beyond "content for the content throne." Instead, we got a film that feels like it was assembled from the spare parts of better adventures, held together with exposition and celebrity cameos.

This isn't a case of ambition exceeding grasp; it's ambition taking a vacation while mediocrity house-sits. HBO had its dragon money and gave us complex narratives and compelling characters. Apple has its iPhone money and gave us... this. A movie that treats its characters of color as inherited property, forgets its own plot threads, and operates on logic that would make a speedrunner blush.

The real tragedy isn't that Fountain of Youth is bad, though it certainly is that. The tragedy is that it's bad in such a boring, predictable way. It's not memorably terrible or ambitiously awful. It's just another forgettable content product, designed to fill streaming service real estate and justify subscription fees. At least Stanley Tucci got paid. That's something, I suppose.

If you want to watch a treasure hunt adventure, go watch the original Indiana Jones trilogy. If you want video game cutscenes, boot up Uncharted and at least get to control the action between the narrative beats. But if you absolutely must watch Fountain of Youth, do it for the anthropological value of seeing exactly how much money you can spend to achieve perfect mediocrity. It's almost impressive, in the way that watching someone parallel park badly for twenty minutes is impressive. You're not entertained, but you can't help but marvel at the sheer commitment to doing something poorly.

Welcome to the future of prestige television, where the budgets are massive, the talent is A-list, and the results are indistinguishable from the kind of movies USA Network used to air on Sunday afternoons. At least those had the excuse of being cheap.