Review Date: November 19, 2004
Country/Year: USA/2004
Director: Jon Turteltaub
Producers: Jerry Bruckheimer, Jon Turteltaub, Christina Steinberg
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Diane Kruger, Harvey Keitel, Justin Bartha, Sean Bean
Genre: Action/Adventure

What to do if you can’t get the rights to turn THE DAVINCI CODE into a movie? If you’re Disney, you strip the concept of religion and make a DAVINCI CODE knockoff. And while there’s nothing wrong with doing so, NATIONAL TREASURE doesn’t quite do enough with its wide-open premise.

Pairing with producer Jerry Bruckheimer for the fourth time, Nicolas Cage stars as Benjamin Gates, a third-generation treasure hunter, hopping the globe in search of a rumored bounty o’ historical booty buried by the nation’s founding fathers that his ancestors failed to find. When we meet him, he’s digging through the snow in the Arctic circle, unearthing a pirate ship.

The boat doesn’t contain the goods, but merely another clue – one that, as he deciphers, suggests the map to said loot is printed in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence. Upon this discovery, he’s double-crossed by his partner (GOLDENEYE villain Sean Bean), who leaves him and his wisecracking sidekick (Justin Bartha) for dead. Knowing that the bad guy will steal the Declaration and destroy it, Cage has no choice but to steal it in order to preserve it.
In the film’s best set piece – although following OCEAN’S ELEVEN and THE ITALIAN JOB, the heist comes off rather light – he does, but unwittingly pulls National Archives hottie Diane Kruger into the dangerous cat-and-mouse chase that results.
The hunt for the treasure – and away from the mean Bean – takes Cage and company clue by clue to all sorts of touristy stops in Washington D.C. Somehow, despite having the FBI after him for the theft of the Declaration, he’s able to hang out at all these unguarded public places with ease. It’s a reminder of the pre-9/11 glory days when people could shoot guns at each other on the city streets and no one would bat an eye.

Though it’s overlong, NATIONAL TREASURE feels underwritten, partly because it tries to be too many things, going from heist film to adventure film to chase film to action film, doing better in some areas than others, though not outright succeeding in any.

It’s by no means bad; it just is. I was entertained enough while watching it, even if I was never fully engaged. It doesn’t do the enough with the clues and the codes, wasting too much of its running time on repetitive getaways and close calls. Overall, this one squeaks by much the same.

In the end, Kruger presents Cage with a map to her vagina.

Review by Rod Lott.