Clearly an attempt to cash in on the ultra-popular novel The Da Vinci Code without the nuisance of buying the rights, National Treasure is an endlessly silly exercise in mock puzzle solving. Nicolas Cage stars as Benjamin Franklin Gates, the latest in a long line of treasure hunters obsessed with finding a massive treasure smuggled into the country by the founding fathers. Starting with a clue left to him by his grandfather, Gates spends half his life tracking down the location of a ship trapped in Arctic ice. After that blows up in his face, literally, he moves on to the next clue to the location of this mythical treasure. It is rather inconveniently located on the back of The Declaration of Independence. Since the National Archives, in a stunning outburst of sensibility, refuse to let the crazy guy near the document, Gates does what everyone would do in his situation and steals it himself, for its safety, because his former partner Ian (Sean Bean) wants to steal it, and he is bad. So he can't have it.
With logic firmly in place in a garbage can located nowhere near the production of this film, we are treated to dual break-ins, one subtle, the other brute force. Inexplicably, both succeed in getting to where the document is kept without raising alarms. At this point I feel compelled to point out that both break-ins were based on the premise that security would be lighter because the National Archive was hosting a fancy gala. Go ahead and savor that logic for a while because after the rest of the movie, it will feel pretty well thought out. This is when the funny bits occur. I think they were meant to be funny but I wouldn't swear to it. Gates tries to escape with the Declaration but is tripped up by that titan of the security industry, the gift shop clerk. Fueled by Cage's delirious ramblings over clues to the treasure and Justin Bartha's wisecrack responses, the story takes on a goofy tone for awhile that matches the ridiculous twists of the treasure hunt. There is this strange synergy in which a plot built almost entirely on crazy leaps of logic is driven along by a pair of actors who seem to be having fun playing up some pretty hammy dialogue. They can't keep the game up forever though as the proceedings start to groan under the weight of mounting implausabilities. The whole thing actually collapses into a black of hole of bad ideas when Jon Voight has to deliver a howler of a speech about how failure is okay because they tried their best.
Voight, Harvey Keitel and Christopher Plummer turn up for bit parts well beneath their stature. It would seem that producer Jerry Bruckheimer had the money to attract A-list character actors when garden variety ones would do just as well. Admittedly they did give more weight to their scenes but it felt sad to watch them use their talents for this slop. Diane Kruger, far better used here than in Troy, makes a good impression. She is exceedingly pleasant to look at and managed to be more than the standard tag-along damsel in distress featured in just about every action flick ever. Justin Bartha, best known for getting out of Gigli with his career intact, gets to be the sidekick with all the funny lines and reaction shots who is tagging along because he's a brilliant computer guy but mostly looks dumb because history isn't his strong suit. Nicolas Cage's presence here just makes you wonder what his method is for picking scripts. How he can pick gems like Adaptation and schlock like this is beyond me.
When I tell you that the movie has an hour's worth of good comedy, it's not a compliment. It's an indication that less than half of this movie is worth watching and you have to put up with an awful lot of nonsense, lazy acting and bad dialogue to find it. The best thing I can say about the movie, apart from Ms. Kruger's cleavage, is that it restores my opinion of Jerry Bruckheimer, who with Black Hawk Down and Pirates of the Caribbean was beginning to develop an odor of respectability about him. Luckily National Treasure is like a deodorant for quality and Bruckheimer can go back to being my favorite producer to deride for churning out the crap that plagues the theaters leaving less room for something with an actual thought in it.
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