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PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 12/19/07)

National Treasure: Book of Secrets, like its predecessor, would probably be a distracting piece of dumb fun if it weren't so insistent on trying to convince you that it was smart. Actors faking "smart" by blandly reciting "smart" words in rapid succession does not make a smart movie.

The concept behind National Treasure works well enough: Nicolas Cage's Benjamin Franklin Gates is, ostensibly, Indiana Jones with an American History major. But Ben Gates is also the problem. If you're going to build a franchise around a character, it's probably best to make sure you have an actual character in the first place. Gates is either a human computer, a super spy, or a bumbling idiot depending on what the plot requires at any given point. In fact, his entire entourage — ex-girlfriend Abigail (Kruger), comic sidekick Riley (Bartha), dad Patrick (Voight), and his newly-introduced mom (Mirren) — don't really exist as people, merely as figures who take turns shouting information at the audience to give the appearance of forward motion in the plot. Which is National Treasure's other major flaw: Rather than engaging the audience in the quest for clues and the solving of riddles, the film simply narrates events as if its audience is too stupid to follow along. Scenes go by like this:

Person 1: "Look! A clue!"
Person 2: "Hey, isn't that a secret Presidential seal?"
Person 3: "It is. And everyone knows that the seal is only found in one bookshelf in the Library of Congress. Luckily I've memorized every possible code combination based on my photographic memory of every president's personal interests, hobbies, and family history."
Person 1: "So we should break into the Library of Congress and find it."
Person 2: "But if you do that, everyone will want to arrest you."
Person 3: "But if we don't do it, we'll never find the treasure…"

And so on, and so on. It feels like an action movie, but then you realize it's actually people reading an action movie to you.

Book of Secrets begins with a recreation of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln before flashing forward to the present, where Ed Harris is introduced as the villain in the most Ed Harris way possible (seriously, if this scene didn't actually feature the man himself, if would have been a spot-on parody of every political film he's ever appeared in). We are then pushed along on a quest for the fabled lost City of Gold, which involves trips to London, Paris, and then, finally, Mt. Rushmore. The details are not important (you'll be told what you need to know, don't worry), just understand that Ed Harris spends the entire movie trying to kill everyone Benjamin Gates loves, and yet apparently has a "nobility clause" in his contract stating that his characters must be given an 11th-hour reprieve for all previous wrongs, even if that reprieve is half-assedly expressed in a single line of dialogue. The attempts at comic relief fall flat mostly — in fact, it's probably a sad testament to the state of our country that the only laughs are uncomfortable ones involving the movie's starry-eyed view of the presidency. After discovering that one of the former commanders-in-chief unlocked one of the puzzles himself, Voight's character shrugs matter-of-factly: "Of course they did. They were the president, the smartest, most capable man in the country." You can probably imagine the tittering that went through the audience. Add to this the presence of Bruce Greenwood in the role of the current president — portrayed as man exuding honor, competence, and charm — and it's, well, kind of depressing, to be honest.

The movie does feature a nice, teasing chemistry between veteran actors Voight and Mirren (who clearly relishes the chance to break out of stuffy melodrama), but this shallow, empty puzzle requires more than playful banter to satisfy audiences willing to pay to play.

— Eric Alt