A Mini-Review Of “National Treasure”

29 Nov, 2004 by John Hawkins

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What do you get when you cross “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” “The Da Vinci Code,” and a really bland script? Why you get this week’s #1 movie, “National Treasure”!

The movie stars Nicolas Cage, who plays a low-rent Indiana Jones in search of a football field full of treasure hidden by some of our Founding Fathers, who were also Freemasons.

As I mentioned, this was the #1 movie in America this week and it’s hard to argue with success, but I’m surprised that a largely unimpressive B movie is doing so well at the box office.

Now sure, “Riley Poole” was an amusing sidekick to Nic Cage’s character who delivered more than his fair share of funny wisecracks. Ooooh and Diane Kruger plays Abigail Chase, an unbelievably hot, intelligent, charming woman, who has a comprehensive knowledge of American history (where are the women like this in real life?)…but those two characters were the high spots.

As I mentioned, Nic Cage’s character reminds me of Indiana Jones, but he’s about half as interesting. Furthermore, the entire movie revolves around Cage’s character doing his best Mulder from “X-Files” impression. You know what I mean…

Scully: Mulder, it looks like this woman was killed by a blow to the head. It looks like this is run-of-the-mill murder, so why are we involved…

Mulder: Because Scully, there’s a Haitian voodoo ritual that requires a woman to be killed by being hit in the head in order to raise zombies from the grave.

Scully: Mulder, that’s ridiculous! People are killed every day of the week by being hit in the head…and we’re in Salt Lake City, Utah — not Haiti! This is just a waste of time….

Mulder: We’ll see Scully, we’ll see…

Fast forward 30 minutes…

Scully: Help! I’m being attacked by zombies!

Mulder: Our only chance is to stop the witch doctor by sticking needles into this doll!

In this case, Cage looks at obscure 200 year old riddles and figures out exactly what they’re supposed to mean in about 30 seconds. Judge for yourself how likely that is.

Furthermore, say what you want about Indiana Jones — at least he had interesting chase scenes. You know, he’s running from giant boulders or rocketing through a cave in an out of control mining cart while bad guys try to kill him. In this movie, not only are the action scenes boring and pedestrian (Oh no, there are guys chasing us and they have guns!), but the bad guys are so generic they’re barely even distinguishable. There was just no thought, no effort…no, no…anything put into making the bad guys more than cardboard cutouts who chase Nic Cage and company around.

So while I wouldn’t call the movie “horrible” or “unwatchable,” it wasn’t particularly entertaining either. Thumbs down….