National Treasure

Freedom fighters: National Treasure keeps your interest, despite flat performances, predictable action

By Anthony Del Valle

While it might be blasphemous to actually recommend National Treasure, it's probably not far off the mark to at least say director Jon Turtletaub (Phenomenon) has enough competence to keep fanatical fans of high-tech heist movies content.

Nicolas Cage plays Benjamin Franklin Gates, an eccentric treasure hunter and novice national historian (with a name like that, what else could he be?) who is convinced someone is about to steal the Declaration of Independence to obtain evidence within the document about a hidden treasure. (His computer-whiz friend Riley [Justin Bartha]

comments, "Who could steal the Declaration of Independence?" and my immediate thought was, "George Bush in 2000." But I digress.)

For six generations, the Gates family has been hunting for this bounty, but by now even Ben's father (Jon Voight) thinks he's an idiot for still believing it exists. When he goes to the FBI and to the National Archives conservator (Diane Kruger), he's not taken seriously.

So Ben figures the only right thing to do is steal the document first. But once that's done, the clues within the document have to be deciphered, and the treasure itself must be located. And all the while this nasty blond-haired foreigner (Sean Bean) is trailing Ben, and so is the FBI, led by Harvey Keitel, who is convinced Ben is simply a criminal. But at least Ben has wooed the beautiful conservator who, after trying at first to get him arrested, becomes convinced he is the good guy.

The enjoyment of this inconsequential film isn't in its suspense; there's surprisingly little of it. The clues come too easily, the plot reversals are uninteresting, the chase scenes--where expert marksmen keep missing their targets even though they often fire at pointblank range--provoke little angst. Even the suggestion of a romance between Ben and the conservator is a dud. (The "climax" of their never-ending onscreen

flirting is a brief, chaste kiss. The two actors don't seem much interested in each other, and the writers don't seem much interested in them.)

Nor is the enjoyment in the performers. Cage's once-interesting face is now too pretty (due to facelifts, I assume) to suggest masculine geekness, and too unnaturally tight to suggest youth. Kruger is dull and generic. Voight goes flabby when he tries to impersonate a character who's too unlike his own personality.

But the info about the prized document, and the fascinating tours of the historical halls and passageways and ventilation shafts and catacombs we get as the good guys try to outrun the bad, gives the movie (even though it's not particularly well-photographed by Caleb Deschanel) a sometimes irresistible ambiance. You're never lectured to about national history, but the writers craftily impart a lot of data.

And there's a sweetness to Ben's quest that is surprising. When he and the conservator chat about how the document came to be, how every one of the Founding Fathers was putting his life on the line by signing it, Ben comments, "Here's to the men who did what was considered wrong, in order to do what they knew was right."

The filmmakers may be onto something. Instead of textbooks that few read, our educational system could turn to heavily plotted caper movies for teaching history. Quick, kids. Someone's trying to steal Bush's secret document listing the locations of all those weapons of mass destruction. Watch Cage go to Washington and then Baghdad to steal them first as we learn not only about the history of Iraq, but the clever political manipulation of the American people by a second-rate mind.

Oh, wow. Did I write that? Sorry, folks. November's been a painful month.