Running time: 100 minutes
Rating 4 out of 10
The two best words to describe National Treasure are Jerry Bruckheimer. Stretch it to three and they'd be suspension of disbelief. Combining both descriptions is almost like tautology. The first has become a Hollywood synonym for the second. The good thing about a Jerry Bruckheimer film is you know what to expect. The bad thing about a Jerry Bruckheimer film is you know what to expect. Delivered with all the subtlety of Liberace's wardrobe, National Treasure is a high concept cross between Indiana Jones and The DaVinci code. A modern day treasure hunt, it's more like a video game but with less realistic characters. The notorious producer has his imprimatur stamped all over National Treasure. From the combustible action, to the corny dialogue it's classic Bruckheimer. He's even teamed up with Nicolas Cage again.
Cage plays the grandly named Benjamin Franklin Gates, a member of a family who, for generations, has been searching for "a treasure beyond all imagining" that has apparently been hidden by the founding fathers from the British. Told of the treasure by his grandfather (Christopher Plummer), young Ben has devoted his life to the quest, despite his father Patrick's (Jon Voight) insistence that it doesn't exist.
The clues to the treasure are elaborate riddles, hidden in seemingly inaccessible places. We first encounter the grown-up Ben as he probes the bleak Arctic landscape for a hidden ship thought to contain the next vital clue. It's here that he falls out with his colleague Ian Howe (Sean Bean) and from this point on the two become staunch adversaries in the race for the treasure. The clichéd baddie Howe is assisted by a bevy of black-clad henchman, while Ben has his nerdy sidekick Riley (Justin Bartha) along for little more than what appears comic relief.
The ensuing hunt involves tracking down and deciphering the complex series of clues, the most daunting of which is a secret map drawn on the back of the Declaration Of Independence. It is during his efforts to steal the document that Ben meets up with the film's glamour quotient, National Archives employee Dr Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger).
Under the directorship of Jon Turteltaub, the fantastical adventure moves along at a healthy enough clip, presumably in the hope that no-one has time to dwell on the ludicrous clues which make no sense, except to Ben who suddenly becomes possessed of extraordinary powers of deduction whenever faced with unintelligible evidence.
Either it's Ben's self-satisfied grin that flashes regularly across his face or it's Cage's barely concealed laughter at the silliness of it all. Either way, finding anything of value in National Treasure is a lot harder for the audience than it is for Gates and co.
Kevin Murphy
