The original was farfetched. The followup fetches even farther.
Aesthetically forgettable but commercially formidable, the lackluster blockbuster, National Treasure, did nonetheless come to resemble the national treasury in 2004.
The film revolved around the Declaration of Independence, and was not originally intended as a franchise. But it attracted an audience sizable enough to make at least one sequel inevitable.
That spawn, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, is about the Lincoln assassination.
And it’s another sputtering dud.
Like its predecessor, it’s a flatfooted, connect-the-dots action-adventure thriller for the family audience with shoddy production values and the depth of a wading pool.
Nicolas Cage returns as treasure hunter Ben Franklin Gates, whose great-great-grandfather, Thomas Gates, is implicated as a co-conspirator in, or even the mastermind of, the assassination of President Lincoln.
This because one of the 18 pages missing from the diary of John Wilkes Booth has surfaced.
To disprove the allegation and clear his family’s name, Ben comes up with an extravagant plan that involves breaking and entering several inaccessible national fortresses as if they were corner grocery stores and even kidnapping the Commander-in-Chief.
Ben seeks a definitive answer about an alleged secret tome passed down from president to president, and for presidents’ eyes only, called the Book of Secrets. As the primary Gates keeper, he claims that his ancestor was not plotting a presidential assassination, but was merely decoding a treasure map of the fabled City of Gold. This is, as you can imagine, very believable stuff.
Director Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure, Phenomenon, While You were Sleeping), working from an our-audience-will-buy-anything script (rated PG for Preposterously Gullible) by Corman and Marianne Wibberley, doesn’t seem to have an iota of motivation to make anything even remotely credible or coherent.
We zip from international landmark to international landmark (in Paris, London, New York, and Washington, D.C.) with no real narrative connective tissue to take us there: It’s like a thrown-together travel brochure punctuated with awkward attempts at humor.
Characters intuit secret passwords and figure out what clues mean with unintentionally hilarious, even idiotic, immediacy: It’s as if everyone in the movie is a psychic who has just screened The Da Vinci Code.
The screenplay quickly gives up on its initially intriguing premise and, instead, turns into a cockeyed precursor of The Poseidon Adventure as the principals fight to escape from the flooded City of Gold.
Where is Shelley Winters when things are not proceeding swimmingly and we really need her?
Once again, as in the original, the family feature struts as if it contains a worthwhile, educational American-history component. Ah, the one thing worse than a stupid movie: a stupid movie that thinks it’s smart.
Returning along with Cage is Jon Voight as his father, Diane Kruger as his ex-girlfriend and National Archives conservator, Justin Bartha as his nervous techie assistant, and Harvey Keitel as an FBI agent. And they’re joined by Ed Harris as a self-invited associate, Helen Mirren as Ben’s divorced mother, and Bruce Greenwood as the current US President.
Cage seems monumentally unengaged, which is understandable given the material and execution. But for director Turteltaub, wasting Cage’s talents along with those of the likes of Voight, Mirren, Harris, and Keitel represents a staggering level of underemployment and underachievement.
Call it Raiders of the Lost Art of Moviemaking, not so much old-fashioned as unfashioned.
And hunt for 1-1/2 stars out of 4 for a slipshod escapist sequel with the kind of comic-book shallowness that only very small children will buy into.
Business may be brisk, but the movie sure isn’t. Hey, it’s no secret: National Treasure: Book of Secrets is no treasure, national or otherwise.
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