National Treasure Review
by [email protected] (Faust668 AT aol DOT com)August 8th, 2005
NATIONAL TREASURE (2004)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: Two stars and a half
"National Treasure" is pure escapism, a sort of latter-day Indiana Jones with Nicolas Cage as the treasure hunter with a heart of gold. Though one may scoff at casting Cage as a hero with a passion for antiquities (well, not quite, but he is knowledgeable about them), do not fret: he gives such a freely entertaining performance that it doesn't matter the film and the character aren't 100% believable.
Cage is Ben Franklin Gates, a devoted "Treasure Protector" who is looking for an ancient treasure that his family of many generations have been seeking, and endured a bad reputation as a result since nobody has ever found it. Gates would like to change all that. After suffering a near-fatal confrontation with some greedy treasure hunters in the Arctic, Gates learns that the map leading to the treasure is written in invisible ink in the back of the Declaration of Independence! The problem is in obtaining this document from the National Archives where it is kept in a highly secure and highly impenetrable system. Not an impossible mission for Ben Gates. Needless to say, he obtains the document (in a sequence so improbable that it will leave you laughing at the sheer ridicule of it) and leaves with the unwilling Dr. Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), a National Archivist who is also devastatingly beautiful and blonde as expected in a movie like this (note the sarcasm). Chase spends a long time being upset that Gates stole a national document, but hey, she changes her mind when sprinkling lemon juice on the document to...well, you get the idea. I'd loved it if she accidentally spilled her perfume
or lipstick on it but then that would be highly improbable, wouldn't it?
So the chase goes on when those evil treasure hunters from the Arctic, headed by Ian (Sean Bean, the villain du jour), track down Cage and his friends and, well, this becomes a sort of latter-day Indiana Jones flick. Their journey takes them from Washington, D.C. to New York City (the latter where we note that the caves from "Gangs of New York" still exist). There are clock towers with hidden letters, countless museums to peruse, those cliched laser beams that guard documents, revolving doors that reveal dusty rooms, icy sailing ships that are hundreds of years old, torches, collapsing stairwells, and so on.
Watching a movie like this is a form of escapism, nothing more. And Nicolas Cage is more than game for it, running and jumping and yelling in the best Cage tradition. He can be so over-the-top that he looks like a madman from Looney Tunes cartoons, and yet remains focused and restrained enough to make us care for him as he embarks on this wild adventure. The less said of Diane Kruger, the Vanity Fair girl from "Troy," the better. There is mild comic relief from Riley (Justin Bartha), Gates's sidekick, who tries to be as clever as Gates. And Sean Bean, who mostly played villains before he played Boromir in "The Lord of the Rings," is appropriately threatening and evil enough. Only Harvey Keitel, Jon Voight and
Christopher Plummer are wasted in secondary roles that anyone could have played.
The movie is overlong and has its lulls. At times, it is tremendously funny and exciting, and sometimes it sputters into oblivion when it tries to be romantic (Cage and Kruger are no romantic pair). If nothing else, "National Treasure" may whet your appetite until the next Indiana Jones flick.
For more reviews, check out JERRY AT THE MOVIES at: _http://www.geocities.com/faustus_08520/Jerry_at_the_Movies.html_ (http://www.geocities.com/faustus_08520/Jerry_at_the_Movies.html)
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