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National Treasure
Story: Nic Cage and friends hunt for the 200 year old treasure hidden by the masons. Running Time: 2hrs 11 minutes. Certificate PG.
National Treasure is a big budget, big star Hollywood headliner. The stars would each have been paid more than you or I will be paid in our lifetimes and well-respected technicians and film-makers would have been employed at significant cost to ensure a high quality end product. With all this in mind, it seems like a spectactular oversight to give the story-writing to a 15-year old with a schoolboy's history book. Actually that's not fair. The average 15-year old who actually reads books would do much better than this.
I enjoyed this film: I think the average moviegoer will enjoy it: Testosterone Satisfaction Rating: Lots of running around and a car chase. To enjoy this film you should: Get very drunk first.
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Cast: Nicolas Cage, Diane Kruger, Justin Bartha, Sean Bean, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Plummer.
Directed by Jon Turteltaub, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.
It's an issue of approach. It's totally fine to have an action film that requires the brain to be turned off -
we've all sat through and enjoyed totally preposterous movies.
The problem comes when such a film tries to be clever. Yes, the way they discover a password is quite
cunning (I shan't spoil it), but then as soon as this happens, it bump-starts your brain and you start
thinking. Within about 5 seconds you realise why it wouldn't have actually worked and once the floodgates
are open, the rest of the plot developments seem to have been copied from the back of a cereal packet.
By way of an example, the second scene sees our heroes in some kind of arctic wilderness. They are looking
for a buried ship, that has been encased in ice, frozen and unfrozen many times to make a "semi-solid migrating
land mass that would land a ship right around here" (without, incidentally, knowing where or when it started from).
They then get their metal detector out and within 20 feet it goes beep, Nic sticks a pick in the ground ONCE and clang,
there it is. Not just the ship, but the NAMEPLATE of the ship conveniently showing us how sparklingly clever they are.
I really am utterly sick of this kind of crap.
Nicolas Cage is, as usual, wholly unconvincing. He always looks like he's been swigging from a scotch bottle before
coming on set, which may go some way to explaining his single appropriate performance in Leaving Las Vegas. Everything
since then shows no evidence whatsoever to support his astronomical fees. He is comprehensively outperformed by everyone
present, in fact the supporting characters all do a very good job. Diane Kruger (Helen of 
Well I'm done here. National Treasure would have appealed to me when I was ten (though it's not as raucous as Indiana
Jones), but nowadays I am pickier. Every single event in the film is completely unbelievable - in fact the whole film
seems to be trying remarkably hard to be Indiana Jones - and I don't mean that in a good way. However, the Indiana Jones
films never seemed to take themselves too seriously, so they are a whole lot more watchable. As often happens though,
I'm in the minority and everyone else seems to be able to forgive its flaws and enjoy it. So I guess I can summarise by
saying: National Treasure is terrible. You'll love it.
