'Fountain of Youth' review: John Krasinski-Natalie Portman adventure is 'Indiana Jones' lite

WHAT IT'S ABOUT John Krasinski and Natalie Portman star as siblings in the Apple TV+ action-adventure picture "Fountain of Youth," which is exactly the movie you think it is, no more and no less.

Krasinski's an adventurer named Luke Purdue, hired by the billionaire Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson) to find the mythical fountain. Owen's dying of liver cancer, you see, and would love to take just one little sip.

Meanwhile, Charlotte (Portman) once joined Luke and their late father on these sorts of globe-trotting missions. But then she grew up, had a son, got a real job, and moved on from it all. Until now.

The story also involves an art theft that includes the raising of the Lusitania from the watery depths of the Celtic Sea, because why not. Chasing the Purdue siblings and Carver are the highly trained Esme (Eiza González), who has her own agenda, and the Interpol agent Jamal Abbas (Arian Moayed).

MY SAY This is yet another "Indiana Jones"-lite, an empty vessel trying to replicate a particular form of movie magic.

Filmmaker Guy Ritchie ("Sherlock Holmes") gets the look right, from an opening chase scene in Bangkok through the climax in Egypt.

Krasinski does the rogue hero thing about as well as possible considering the one-dimensional screenplay. That comes complete with forced, incessant bickering with Portman and a touch of flirting with González when they're not beating each other up.

We know these people. We know everything about them. But we don't get anything beyond the familiar and the expected. Forget Harrison Ford and Indiana Jones; we're a long way from even Nicolas Cage in the "National Treasure" movies, where there was at least a different sort of weird energy.

That malaise extends to the storytelling. It's rendered without a hint of a spark of creativity or an apparent desire to do anything beyond the expected. The Fountain of Youth lends itself to some offbeat territory, or at least some sort of engagement with a mythological framework. The eternal quest for it says something essential about human nature. It's probably a lot to ask a movie like this to delve too far into anything like that. But here, it's just another MacGuffin.

You might at least hope for a sliver of entertainment in the action scenes, if nowhere else. Ritchie knows his way around a big sequence, having spent decades working in this space. But they're as dull and uninspired as the rest of the movie.

There's something rather sad about how ordinary it all plays. The movie can and should be much better than this.

The fact that it's so incredibly dull makes it a poster child for one of the chief criticisms of the glut of streaming fare these days: that the incessant drive to fulfill whatever the algorithm says audiences want to see has been a death knell for creativity.

BOTTOM LINE This is mediocrity personified.