Apple Still Searching For the Fountain of Good Movies
I had high hopes for The Fountain of Youth. Yes, the trailer looked a little too cute, but I’m generally a fan of the treasure-hunt-while-traveling genre. And I’m a John Krasinski fan. Not just Jim from The Office but also Jack from the CIA. And here we had Krasinski morphing from Jack Ryan into the vein of another Harrison Ford role: Indiana Jones. Not explicitly here, but spiritually perhaps.
At least, that was the hope.
As it turns out, nah. Sadly, The Fountain of Youth just isn’t any good. It’s not awful, but it’s painfully mediocre, just as so many Apple movies seem to be these days. The scenery is nice enough, but the entire thing feels hollow. The “twist” isn’t even particularly twisty in so much as it’s obviously boring and so nonchalantly revealed that it’s not clear anyone actually cares even in the movie itself.
The film is touted as being directed by Guy Ritchie, but nothing about it feels particularly Guy Ritchie. It feels very cookie cutter, with a script that drops it just below a replacement level movie.
Anyway, that's probably all I need to say about The Fountain of Youth explicitly, but I continue to be more interested in the fact that Apple keeps running this same playbook. They take interesting talent, pair them together, and make movies ranging from completely forgettable to un-memorably mediocre. Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson. Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy. Matt Damon and Casey Affleck.1 Chris Evans and Ana de Armas.2 George Clooney and Brad Pitt! And now we can officially add John Krasinski and Natalie Portman to the list.
To give Apple some benefit of the doubt here, perhaps this is just the latest in a series of movies they greenlit a while ago only to realize that none of them were particularly good. And they ripped the band-aid off in the harshest way possible by yanking the Clooney/Pitt yawner Wolfs out of theaters. And perhaps they're still taking their lumps for that slate. This one, they timed for the long Memorial Day weekend. It would have been slaughtered against Mission: Impossible - Final Reckoning and Lilo & Stitch, but as an at-home streaming option with some marquee names, perhaps it got some people to sign up for Apple TV+.
But if they signed up to watch this, they probably wanted to cancel right after.
Luckily for Apple, that's not really how it works. Instead, now those new customers have at least a month to watch anything else on Apple TV+. And actually, there are plenty of great options – it's just that almost all of them are "television" series.
The dichotomy between these two segments of Apple TV+ remains wild. The shows are, for the most part, very good. The movies are, for the most part, pretty bad. Again, maybe what we're seeing now is the lingering stuff before a strategy shift, but I'm still surprised that such a clear split in quality happened. And I'm more than slightly worried that Fountain of Youth indicates that split will continue.
Basically, it's now all riding on F1, the Joseph Kosinski – not to be confused with John Krasinski – directed and also Brad Pitt-starring racing movie.3 It looks great. And it looks not just perfect for movie theaters, but perfect for IMAX theaters in particular. Apple should have a hit there – their first real one. But I'm starting to worry now that it too won't be any good. I'm not sure how much that matters for a movie like this. But I might have thought the same for a movie like The Fountain of Youth.
Whomever is greenlighting this stuff just has bad taste, it seems. And it has left a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to Apple TV+ movies.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 Which I still haven't even bothered to watch myself, despite being an Apple TV+ subscriber from day one.
2 Zero desire to see this one.
3 Can't wait for the press tour questions about why Pitt loves Apple for F1 versus Wolfs.