National Treasure: Book of Secrets film rating and review

National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007) film rating and review :

Busy but not thrilling

The hyperactive sequel National Treasure: Book of Secrets sends its archaeologist hero, Ben Franklin Gates (Nicolas Cage, flexing his deadpan), on a globetrotting quest that might have been devised after a long night of Wikipedia surfing.

Returning Characters includes Ben’s archaeologist daddy, Patrick Gates (the improbably dignified Jon Voight); Ben’s techie sidekick, Riley Poole (Justin Bartha), who extricates Ben from impossible Situations and serves up expository Softballs; and Ben’s now-ex-girlfriend, Abigali Chase (Diane Kruger), whose dalliance with the press Secretary (Ty Burrell) of the president of the united states enables the gang to hunt for clues in the oval Office.

New faces include Patrick’s ex-wife, Emily Appleton (Helen Mirren), a scholar of ancient languages, who is shy and sexy even while translating pre-Columbian glyphs; and a rival archaeologist and Confederate sympathizer named Mitch Wilkinson (Ed Harris), who Brazenly accuses a Gates ancestor, Thomas Gates (Joel Gretsch), of collaborating with Abraham Lincoln’ assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

Booth just happened to shoot Lincoln on the same night that he and a co-con-spirator Pressured Thomas Gates into translating a dairy page that disclosed the location of Cibola, the fabled lost city of gold. To clear the Gates family name, the good guys must prove the existence of Cibola by finding the long-dispersed fragments of a map, one of which is hidden in a compendium of secrets handed down from president to president.

To acquire the cleverly named Book of Secrets, Ben plots to kidnap the current president (Bruce Greenwood) and blah, blah, blah purple monkey dishwasher.

Granted, coherence and Plausibility matter as much here as they did in the Indiana Jones films and North by Northwest. But Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock’s escapist pictures were more than time wasters. They offered dreamily intense predicaments, lived-in relationships, for which the prickly banter of Ben and Patrick is a pale substitute, and action scenes built from dynamic shots that interlocked like stained-glass window panels.

The best one can say for this franchise is that almost every character is educated and proud of it. Even the brusque Parisian cops who interrupt Ben and Riley’s inspection of the Statue of Liberty in Paris can’t resist joining Ben in a discussion of the Baron de Montesquieu role in creating constitutional democracy.

Such eccentricities are welcome, but they cannot approach memories of Indy outrunning a boulder and Eva Marie Saint Dangling near George Washington’s colossal mug.

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