12/24/2007

National Treasure: Book of Secrets


Review by Loc

In the height of mainstream The Da Vinci Code hype, out popped a movie. Twas a simple flick, a ho-hum treasure hunt movie with puzzles and conspiracies. Yet, the intrigue was a bit different in that the entire film played out like a revisionist history to the United States. More curiously, the mysteries were toned down to ensure that everything was accessible to everyone. No huge conspiracies about a massive church cover-up. Nope, what you got is a layered retelling of the American history. And thus, National Treasure was born, and audiences ate it up to the tune of $173 million dollars in domestic box office. I guess the thrill of finding clues in our money is just too much fun.

Cut to three years later, and another mystery arrives at our doorsteps. Yes, for some inexplicable reason, Nation Treasure has spawned a sequel called National Treasure: Book of Secrets. For all the marketing and trailers, one might expect the puzzles to be ratcheted up several notches and the unveiling of secrets to be immense. If so, one would have set their expectations too high. Quick hit: relatively lazy storytelling.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets represents a throwback in so many ways. First, it’s a nod to the old action-adventure yarn, stuff that was borne out of Indiana Jones. Yet, much like every recent foray into the genre, this flick is like a photocopied photocopy, not much crisp or fresh, just the same old thing reprinted too many times.

Second, NT:BoS is an homage to the old school sequel, meaning this flick doesn’t try very hard to offer a compelling companion piece to its predecessor. The plot is not original, nor are the characters. The action is quite rote and tricky puzzles are not intriguing. In essence, you get a rehash of the original rehash, making this a photocopied photocopy of the first photocopy. And as you can guess, that’s way too many photocopies of anything.

Cutting to the chase, Nic Cage decides he must clear his family’s good name in the face of a traitorous accusation. To do so, he realizes he must hunt down an treasure once associated with the traitorous faction…huh? Well look, if you just have Nic Cage doing normal research, that would be a boring library movie. So what if the treasure hunt is so thinly connected to anything resembling a plot, it’s got to have legs!

Moving on, Cage and bickering girlfriend, bumbling tech guy, old-man Jon Voight, and new mom Helen Miren, take off to span the globe and solve the puzzles. It’s like the Scooby gang, minus Scrappy Doo. Oh, and this time Ed Harris fills in as evil guy trying to manipulate Nic to do his bidding. Unfortunately, Ed Harris doesn’t have the cool Sean Bean accent, but Ed does introduce an intermittent Southern accent as a substitute.

Enough about the “plot”, what about the cool mysteries? Well, the mysteries are surface scratchers, for lack of a better term. In the first National Treasure, the puzzles led to bigger discoveries, nuanced items offered bigger clues and kept the audience engaged. Things like hidden messages in our money are already urban legends, so building a bigger mythology out of them is acceptable and fun. This time around, the conspiracies are quite abstract and vague. And the connections come too easily and quickly. That’s not to say the writers didn’t work hard to create compelling plot points, but it did seem like the lightning would not be caught a second time. And furthermore, the original lightning wasn’t that spectacular to begin with.

Yet, this is a basic flick without huge aspirations. This is a movie aimed to cater to all audiences, old and young, sophisticated or not, and simply entertain. The first one did a good job at it. The sequel was a bit too flat. It’ll play very well when it ends up on the USA network for a National Treasure marathon.

Overall, National Treasure: Book of Secrets doesn’t inspire much of anything. Some of the writing is good, but there’s not much chuckling or pulse-pounding action. The cast is solid, but they seem to know that they’re working with flat material. And the interwoven, thrilling conspiracy is little more than contrived plot points. Out of 47 pages of the President’s Book of Secrets, National Treasure 2 manages to decipher 26 pages. There’s little revelation in this run-of-the-mill flick.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This movie was solidly average.