Critics, Audiences Rejecting “Fountain of Youth”

More often than you might think, films can unite everyone – critics, audiences, trolls, etc. – with a fairly widely agreed upon consensus. We’ve already seen it at the movies twice this year with the universally praised “Sinners” and the universally panned live-action “Snow White”. We’re seeing it again this weekend, but maybe not for […] The post Critics, Audiences Rejecting “Fountain of Youth” appeared first on Dark Horizons.

May 26, 2025 - 04:00

Critics, Audiences Rejecting “Fountain of Youth”

More often than you might think, films can unite everyone – critics, audiences, trolls, etc. – with a fairly widely agreed upon consensus. We’ve already seen it at the movies twice this year with the universally praised “Sinners” and the universally panned live-action “Snow White”.

We’re seeing it again this weekend, but maybe not for the film you might expect. Guy Ritchie’s treasure hunting “Fountain of Youth,” a costly $180 million-budgeted action-adventure, is fairly consistently pulling in review numbers suggesting not so much a crazy disaster as the most blandly mediocre thing Ritchie has done in a while.

Essentially dismissed as some sort of Raiders/Uncharted/National Treasure/Tomb Raider/Allan Quatermain style rip-off, the film stars John Krasinski, Natalie Portman, Eiza González, Domhnall Gleeson, Laz Alonso and Stanley Tucci. It follows a pair of estranged siblings who team up and embark on a journey to find the famed Fountain of Youth.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film is sitting at just 37% with 65 critics reviews counted. The audience score isn’t much higher, coming in at only 42% from over 250 ratings. On Metacritic the film is at 41/100 with critics and a not much better 5.2/10 with audiences.

On The IMDB the film stands at a 5.8/10 score from readers, the second lowest score to date for a Ritchie-directed feature – the first being “Swept Away” at just 3.6/10. Across all sites “Swept Away” remains, by far, his worst received film with this and “Revolver” seemingly neck-and-neck for second worst.

Many are wondering about the eye-watering price tag for the film, which was shot across Vienna, Egypt and England. The project cost three times that of Ritchie’s better received and underrated “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” Released direct-to-streaming, the film is currently available via the Apple TV+ service.

The post Critics, Audiences Rejecting “Fountain of Youth” appeared first on Dark Horizons.