NATIONAL TREASURE BOOK OF SECRETS

WALT DISNEY PICTURES
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: B-
Directed by: John Turteltaub
Written By: Cormac Wibberley, Marianne Wibberley, Story by Gregory Poirier, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Cormac Wibberley, Marianne Wibberley
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Justin Bartha, Diane Kruger, Jon Voight, Helen Mirren, Ed Harris, Bruce Greenwood, Harvey Keitel
Screened at: AMC Empire, NYC, 12/19/07
Opens: December 21, 2007

The average history teacher below the college level makes, let’s say, $40,000 a year, while the original “National Treasure,” which came out three years ago, raked in $347 million. Is there something wrong here? In a way, yes. How come there’s so much interest in U.S. history not only in our own country, but worldwide—where box office outside the U.S. took in much as it did domestically? Perhaps, just maybe, the interest came not because of a fascination with the American Revolution but with the stunts, all made possible because of the big bucks that mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer has at his disposal. Bruckheimer, who has time and again proved that the more you spend on a movie the more you clear in profits, says in the press notes to “National Treasure Book of Secrets,” “I love history…but just laying a bunch of historical facts on the screen is going to bore an audience half to death. …We had to make a real adventure to find facts that audiences might not know much about, make it exciting to discover, and put the character in jeopardy.”

Well, now, as a former history teacher, I showed how characters were put into jeopardy in just about every lesson, but I rarely elicited the excitement shown by one character in this movie, scholar Emily Appleton (Helen Mirren), who upon discovering the key to an ancient language, jumped for joy, exclaiming how this would open up the door to vast information about pre-Colombian history! Rarely did I get the excitement shown in a brief discussion between Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) and an nine-year-old (Zachary Gordon) who had quite a thrust-and-parry surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s theater, each suggesting a different theory about whether the bodyguard or bodyguards were “in” on the conspiracy and therefore not around to protect the great man from the assassin—who had a clear shot to the back of the Great Emancipator’s head.

“National Treasure Book of Secrets” centers, then, on a circumstance of the Civil War where the original pic dealt with an event that began eighty-five years earlier, the American Revolution, (I throw in this bit of information because polls show that a surprising percentage of American youths have no idea when the “Silver War” began—some suggesting 1900, just as some say that World War II was between the U.S. and Russia.)

The story, like the preceding one, is by five writers and you can practically use the reviews of the original as a template—that’s how formulaic the series about fortune-hunting is turning out. This time, instead of Benjamin Franklin Gates’ (Nicolas Cage) needing to discover that a treasure map exists on the back of the Declaration of Independence, he must decipher a partially burned page of the diary of Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth. The page appears to implicate an ancestor of Ben Gates’s dad, university professor Patrick Gates (Jon Voight), as a co-conspirator in Lincoln’s assassination (when in fact the man was a hero—as we see from an opening scene taken from 1865, one which is more interesting than the rest of the movie). Professor Gates is motivated to clear his name while Gates’s son, Ben, working with his ex-girlfriend, archivist Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger) and techie-nerd Riley Poole (Justin Bartha), believe that the page has a treasure map which, decoded, will lead them to The City of Gold. They enlist the help of linguistics professor Emily Appleton, estranged from Patrick for thirty-two years, while running into violent competition from Mitch Wilkinson (Ed Harris), who has his own reasons for finding The City of Gold and is willing to kill to locate and claim it for himself.

If you’ve seen the first film, you’ve have not quite seen this as well: just substitute a few locations. Producer Bruckheimer has sunk quite a bit of money into the global spots making your eight bucks or eleven (the latter if you’re from New York) peanuts or popcorn for which you get to see some of the best areas in Paris, London and, in the USA the sacred Mount Rushmore in South Dakota and also the inner sanctum of the Library of Congress. Harvey Keitel is FBI again trying to nab Gates—this time for kidnapping the President of the United States (Bruce Greenwood, who else?) while Justin Bartha, still a techie, has written a book this time but that has not helped him with the women, at least until he proves himself as an adventurer.

For acting, I’d wager that Dame Helen Mirren, who nabbed the Oscar as the title figure in Stephen Frears’ 2006 “The Queen,” made more money in this one, outclassing everyone else in the movie even with just a side role. But I cannot see Justin Bartha as any kind of actor.

For romance, Diane Kruger plays hard-to-get, but there’s nothing like the mutual fear of death to get couples together, which helps the older Patrick and Abigail after thirty-two years to bury the hatchet as though in a Shakespearean subplot. The adventure is as unbelievable and Indiana-Jones-like as the first “National Treasure,” the City of Gold no more amazing than Peru’s Macchu Picchu. One hopes that the movie will give the teens and tweens more interest in history, but then, how can Mr. Peepers and Mr. Chips with their chalk and board compete with Jon Turteltaub, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Nic Cage?

Rated PG. 125 minutes. © 2007 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online