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National Treasure - Book of Secrets
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The year is 1865 and two shifty looking characters enter a bar looking for Thomas Gates. They have an encrypted message hidden in a diary and Gates is just the man to crack it. As he begins to work through the code one of the men slips away, his name is John Wilkes Booth and he's off to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
Realising that the men are confederate sympathisers and having determined that the message is a clue to a vast treasure trove Gates takes advantage of a disruption in the bar to rip out several pages of the diary and throw them on the fire before being shot. The man retrieves some undamaged scraps from the flames and escapes. As Gates dies he beckons his young son close and says with his final breath: 'The debt that all men pay.'
Fast forward to the present day and Ben Gates (great-great-grandson of Thomas Gates) is retelling the story at a conference on Civilian Heroes to great acclaim, as he milks the applause Mitch Wilkinson, a black market trader, steps forward with one of the missing pages of the diary. On the page is a list, headed by John Wilkes Booth, of the conspirators behind Lincoln's assassination and on that list appears the name Thomas Gates.
Dah, dah, daaaah!
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What follows is 120 odd minutes of fast paced action where Ben Gates, mercilessly tracked by the evil Wilkinson, seeks to clear his great-great-grandaddy's name, find the lost city of gold and last, but not least (as she's the very fit Diane Kruger), get the girl.
OK, at this point I want to make two things clear. Firstly, this is a very silly film. It has a wafer thin plot and the most tenuous of links with reality. Secondly, it is damn good fun and a hell of a good way to spend a couple of hours.
NT - BoS, as we in the know call it, has a lot going for it. Big budget blockbuster fodder it comes with typical Disney polish. The set pieces and special effects are lavish and well executed, the pace is unrelenting and we are driven from one action packed scene to another with barely a minute to draw breath and certainly no time to sit back and think 'hang on, that doesn't make sense'. The cast too are top drawer, Jon Voight, Helen Mirren, Ed Harris and Harvey Keitel are all superb actors and fill the supporting roles faultlessly, giving the film a good deal of credibility along the way. Now, Nicolas Cage is not a great actor but he is a great movie star and leads the film well. Although acted off the screen by those around him in most scenes he does enough as the hero not to let anyone down.
In typical treasure hunting style the action travels the world, moving from Washington to Paris, on to London and finally Mount Rushmore as Gates tracks down and solves a series of clues that will lead to the final showdown. These locations may not be as exotic as those found in Raiders or Lara Croft films but then the National Treasure franchise is very US-centric, not that this is particularly a problem and the familiarity of the locations bring their own rewards.
One of the drawbacks of the pace of the film is that you never get the chance of having a crack at the clues yourself before they are solved and the action moves on. Not that you'd have much chance of solving them as they are very obscure and play fast and loose with the truth anyway, there are no straightforward number or word puzzles such as found in The Da Vinci Code to get your teeth into. Gates can solve them all on the hoof though as he has a Wikipedia like mind (lots of information, not necessarily 100% accurate) and if he is ever stumped there will be someone in his immediate family on hand - to translate extinct pre-Columbian hieroglyphs, for example. Which is handy.
The list of clues takes Gates to a replica Statue of Liberty in Paris (or maybe it's the original, who knows). This is straightforward as it is in a public place but his next ports of call involve breaking into private rooms in Buckingham Palace and the Oval Office, both of which are managed with nothing more than a laptop and a silver tongue. All of these things require huge suspension of belief on the part of the audience as they are achieved rather unconvincingly but the pace of the film moves you on before too many questions have formed in your mind and while you're still thinking 'I wonder if that's true' as he solves another riddle he's off to collect the final piece of the puzzle from the moon. (I've slipped a Red Herring in there so as not to give too much away).
There's a whole bunch of other stuff going on with car chases, presidential conspiracy theories and a thinly veiled teaser for the next sequel but you don't need to know about that now, just sit back and enjoy the ride.
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It's been a long, long time since the last Indiana Jones film but the National Treasure and Lara Croft films have taken up the slack nicely without ever coming close to eclipsing the originals. The Nicolas Cage films are enjoyable romps and I've had the pleasure of watching the Tomb Raider films several times (and at various play back speeds) but the real test, for all concerned, will be on the release of the new Indiana Jones film in May this year. If it can match the originals it will blow these imitators out of the water but if it comes up short there may still be life in the franchises yet.
National Treasure - Book of Secrets is released on DVD on 2 June 2008 and can be pre-ordered from Amazon for £12. Or you can download it for free from Bit torrent - but you didn't hear that from me, right?
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Production Year: 1964 - Action/Adventure - Director: Cyril Endfield - Original Language: English - Classification: Parental Guidance - Starring:Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins, Ulla Jacobsson, James Booth, Michael Caine, Nigel Green
Production Year: 2002 - Action/Adventure - Director: Vincenzo Natali - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring:Lucy Liu, David Hewlett, Anne Marie Scheffler, Joseph Scoren, Matthew Sharp, Jeremy Northam
Production Year: 1977 - Action/Adventure - Director: Clint Eastwood - Original Language: English - Classification: 18 years and over - Starring:Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Pat Hingle, William Prince, Bill McKinney
Advantages: Kids will enjoy being able to follow the clues. Disadvantages: Adults may feel shortchanged by the poor production values and spoon-feeding script.
Advantages: Good escapism, quite action packed, one for conspiracy theorists! Disadvantages: Very American!, story is pretty far stretched and confusing (though still quite enjoyable)
Advantages: Kids will enjoy being able to follow the clues. Disadvantages: Adults may feel shortchanged by the poor production values and spoon-feeding script.
Apr 30th, 2008
exceptional by (1%):
very helpful by (99%):
