National Treasure: Book of Secrets

Black market antiquity. Revisionist history. Hidden treasures that are sought by opposing good and evil factions. Desks with secret compartments. A book of secrets that only our country's presidents have access to. Those are the clues that drive National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, a shiny, guilty pleasure popcorn flick of the highest order.

This fun film is everything a Hollywood blockbuster should be. That is, its quick moving storyline is clever, weaving a network of clues, secrets, and searches for the truth without ever getting too convoluted, thus alienating the viewer and his or her attention span. You don't need to hold a Ph.D in history to comprehend the plot of National Treasure 2, because the screenwriters kept things simple. It's ultimately a visually arresting roller coaster of a film, allowing the captive audience to ride sidecar on a scintillating adventure of bang 'em up crashes. There's a slew of action that follows, including a presidential kidnapping and a search for the lost city of gold. The film is nothing if not dense with information, but it never works itself into a complicated, too-much-data corner. Its strength is that it's easy to follow, with both eyes and mind.

Repeating the performance he gave in the massively successful original was an easy task for star Nicolas Cage, while producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who has built an empire on thematically hollow yet explosive films, more than indulges his fetish for fast-paced action with this sequel. Emotional depth is not the goal for National Treasure 2, and to their credit, Cage, Bruckheimer, and director John Turtletaub don't aim for the heavens or try to make their movie into something it can't be. Cage and his crooked smile return for the role of Ben Franklin Gates, his mission being to clear an ancestor who is wrongly implicated as a planner of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Apparently, the secrets of the conspiracy are locked deep in a Presidential book, and Gates will stop at nothing to get his hands on it and wipe his relative's historical slate clean.

Jon Voight and Helen Mirren are a hoot as Ben's bickering, divorced, scholarly parents, and they provide comic relief alongside their dry-witted son, who offers more than his fair share of quips with his sharp love interest, Diane Kruger's Abigail. He also engages in verbal foreplay with his sidekick, Riley, played with low key sarcasm by Justin Bartha. The dialogue is at once snappy and corny. Again, a perfect formula for a film like this, where the laughs need to come in continuous spurts.

National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets is more surface than substance and it's doubtful that anyone involved in the picture would dispute that. Sometimes, you need to go to the multiplex, grab a 32-ounce drink and a bottomless bag of buttery popcorn, and chomp away while forgetting about the outside world. If you're in the mood to watch a movie yet forgo a hefty emotional lesson, National Treasure 2 is more than happy to indulge you.

— Amy Sciarretto
06.04.08

National Treasure: Book of Secrets makes no attempt to disguise its sources. Like its predecessor, this outing functions as kind of a low-rent variation on the Indiana Jones films, and bears the distinct high-gloss production stamp of Jerry Bruckheimer. This is the cinematic equivalent of cotton candy, and gives us virtually nothing substantial to take away from it. And yet, on a completely sophomoric, mechanical level (and even at an excessive 123 minutes) the film feels aggressively enjoyable. It's an undemanding, carnivalesque thrill-ride that whisks the audience off on a high-flown string of adventures, with a host of urban legends that seem pulled straight from brazen adolescent fantasies. We're given desks with secret compartments that house strange carvings, an ancient city of gold buried in booby-trapped caverns beneath a national monument, and a presidential "Book of Secrets" containing every long-buried skeleton that the U.S. government doesn't want us to know about. All of this is gleefully absurd, of course, but for those willing to accept the film's high-flung fantasy and nonetheless suspend reality in their minds, NT2 provides more than its share of kicks and thrills. By the 90-minute mark, when the protagonists reach the said cavern, one feels that one has fallen into a big-budget movie version of the old arcade game Pitfall 2; Book provides the same sorts of hijinks and setpieces. It also feels refreshing to see actors as brilliant and as serious as Harvey Keitel, Jon Voight, and Helen Mirren (in supporting roles) let their hair down and have a good time with material that is knowingly ridiculous and absurd. Unfortunately, if Bruckheimer -- sensing the closure of the Harrison Ford-starring Indiana Jones vehicles with Crystal Skull, given Ford's age -- wanted to unofficially spin-off his own franchise, he made a poor choice with the creation of Treasure's lead character, Benjamin Franklin Gates (Nicolas Cage). Part of what makes the Jones films so much fun is their ability to spin outrageous whoppers yet, thanks to Ford, retain a deeply human, incredulous, self-deprecating protagonist with a sarcastic sense of humor and at least one major Achilles' Heel. (Read: snakes). Cage never gives us that balance, not even once. His Gates is a kind of patriotic Übermensch, a walking historical encyclopedia implausibly rife with facts and figures and seldom, if ever, prone to making slip-ups (nary a one in sight, here). And perhaps as a result, it becomes almost impossible to empathize with him. Director Jon Turteltaub, Bruckheimer, and scriptwriters Cormac and Marianne Wibberley attempt to compensate for this by giving Gates as an assistant a sophomoric, goofball hack named Riley Poole (Justin Bartha); it doesn't work. One can also fault Bruckheimer for some self-indulgent excess -- apparently it is no longer necessary for him to even put his surname under his production company identification at the beginning of the picture, because here the logo appears without a name; instead, he trademarks his involvement in the film with a couple of gratuitous and unnecessary car chase scenes that the film could very easily do without, and that seem purely designed to let Jerry unleash his destructive, adrenaline-fueled urges and identify his presence. Spare us. But these moments are primarily limited to the film's initial half-hour, and after that, the picture sinks into an exciting, groovy rush and even begins to recall the old-time Saturday matinee serials as Raiders of the Lost Ark did. Taken for what it is, and approached sans expectation, Book of Secrets should please many undemanding viewers, especially teenage and preteen males, with its roller coaster-like ride of thrills. It's surprisingly fun. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide