As a rule, I try to stay as far away from Jerry Bruckheimer movies as possible. I’ve learned that he and I don’t exactly see eye to eye. A few notable exceptions are Black Hawk Down, the first Pirates of the Caribbean and perhaps Crimson Tide. I’ll throw Top Gun in there as an oldie but a goodie. Sure, Bruckheimer is enormously talented and unquestionably has the best eye in the business for material that will make a boatload of money, but with a resume that includes Armageddon and Pearl Harbor (just to name a few of the biggies) is that really something to get excited about?
The first National Treasure installment was a moronic, overblown scavenger hunt masquerading as a high concept social studies lesson. The sequel, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, is bigger, louder and, implausible as it is to believe, even more preposterous.
When we last saw our heroes, they’d discovered treasure galore, love was blossoming and fame was waiting in the wings. Oh the difference a sequel makes. Ben Gates (Nicholas “audience fatigue” Cage) and girlfriend, Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), have broken up, forcing Ben to move in with his father, Patrick (Jon Voight, who continues a recent trend of only choosing roles in which he gets to play a buffoon). Sidekick Riley (Justin Bartha — all these sorts of movies require a wisecracking, technologically savvy sidekick) is depressed over dismal returns on his tell-all book, not to mention being under investigation by the IRS for tax fraud. Things go from bad to worse when a long lost page from John Wilkes Booth’s diary surfaces and implicates Ben’s great-great grandfather as a key conspirator in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. The man in possession of the page, Mitch Wilkinson (Ed Harris), is a black market antiquities dealer and ruthless mercenary whose family has had a bone to pick with the Gates family for more than a century. Now it seems the Wilkinsons’ will have the last laugh.
Determined to prove his ancestor’s innocence despite the preponderance of evidence, Ben, Patrick, Abigail and Riley team up with Ben’s mother and Patrick’s formidable ex-wife, Emily (Helen Mirren), a linguistics expert, to unravel the clues before the Gates’ name is forever smeared. The puzzle leads them on a globetrotting adventure in which they hunt for evidence in Paris, break into both Buckingham Palace and the White House, engage in a car chase through London sure to set off an international incident or two, steal from the Library of Congress, kidnap the President of the United States (Bruce Greenwood), and discover a lost, Incan city of gold.
National Treasure’s screenwriters have pillaged American mythology, called it history and converted it into farcical entertainment. It’s as if they randomly selected iconic monuments and moments from a grab bag of America’s colorful past, arbitrarily arranged them on a table, and said, “Now then, what kind of story can we make out of that?” And still, almost every scene in this long-winded and silly action movie manages to be ripped off from somewhere else.
Before National Treasure: Book of Secrets began, I found myself in conversation with the critic next to me, bemoaning the lack of good children’s films — the sort of fantastical adventure movies my generation grew up watching. Where, I wondered aloud, was a modern The Goonies? As it turned out, all I had to do was wait a few minutes. Secret maps, buried treasure, scary skeletons, spooky caves, bad guys with guns — it was all right here! Except in place of kids you now have adults. In place of Sean Astin and Corey Feldman you now have Nicolas Cage and Jon Voight. What was once absurdist, escapist fun for children has now been stolen and reappropriated as ludicrous and interminable entertainment for adults. National Treasure is the sort of storyline dreamt up by imaginative kids on the playground and that is where it should stay.
This Americana Indiana Jones wannabe is a poor and ridiculous substitute for the real thing. To paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bentsen at the 1988 vice-presidential debate: “National Treasure, I watched Indiana Jones. I knew Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones was a friend of mine. National Treasure, you are no Indiana Jones.”
© Copyright 2007 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
