Movies have always been and will always be about suspension of disbelief. After all, except for young children and those with some sort of mental condition, we all know that what's up there on the screen is just make believe. Of course, back "in the day," naive audiences were shocked when a character shot a pistol toward the camera (and thus, by visual inference, at them) in "The Great Train Robbery" (1903) and some fainted and/or got sick from scenes in "The Exorcist" many decades later.
Well, as a collective viewership, we've come a long way since those times, and it's become harder to surprise, shock, or simply get audiences to put their disbelief aside for two hours or so and just go along for the ride. Nevertheless, the best cinematic storytellers out there can still manage to make us "believe," simply by getting us involved with the characters and story, as well as through stellar filmmaking techniques.
Notwithstanding its global success, Jon Turteltaub's "National Treasure" didn't prove any of that for me back upon its release in 2004. The tale of a modern day treasure hunter following cryptic clues left by America's founding fathers, the film did have a quick pace and lots of action. Yet, it became progressively sillier and more preposterous with each step (and misstep) it took along the way, so much so that it mitigated any sort of turn off your brain, escapist entertainment value it might have otherwise possessed.
I suppose then, I shouldn't be surprised that its inevitable sequel, "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" has been poured from the exact same mold. With most of the original cast returning and inexplicably being joined by heavy-duty talent such as Ed Harris and Helen Mirren, the film goes through the same motions as the original.
In short, if you found the first film and its preponderance of flaws entertaining, the same will likely hold true here. If you didn't, however, it's unlikely this globe-trotting sequel will change your mind about it or its predecessor, especially when the two films are so much alike.
Notwithstanding its conspiracy-minded plot (where historical figures in the past conspired by creating a byzantine labyrinth of connected but cryptic clues all leading to a lost city of gold), convenient developments (one of the few scholars who can decipher ancient Indian just so happens to be the protagonist's mother), and increasingly preposterous behavior, the hardest thing to believe in is the rationale behind the main character's actions.
You see, Ed Harris' nebulous character has arrived with a missing page from John Wilkes Booth's diary that indicts Ben Gates' (Nicolas Cage with a bad haircut) great-grandfather as a co-conspirator in President Lincoln's assassination. Okay, I suppose if your life and that of your ancestors has been wrapped up in researching and solving historical matters, that might rub you the wrong way. And I can see how the discovery of the aforementioned glittery city might have made a difference (budget wise for the Confederacy) back in the American Civil War as is repeatedly discussed here.
Nevertheless, this isn't a period piece about the desire for just that, and so Ben's quest doesn't have enough at stake for viewers to care or believe the degrees to which he'll go to succeed (that include, of all things, kidnapping the President of the United States). The result is a film that, like the original, feels like a lukewarm imitation of the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" pics, "Mission: Impossible," and now even some James Bond thrown in for (intended) good measure.
I'm sure audiences will once again eat it up, and there certainly is something to be said for a filmmaker and releasing studio making a non-kid based action-adventure flick that gets by with just PG rated material. That said, however, and above and beyond the aforementioned faults, I just wish the film were more engaging and exciting.
The various chase sequences and action set pieces are surprisingly flat (especially in comparison with other action pics of recent that have seriously upped the ante in terms of such material), the humor is, for the most part, fairly lame, and the characters and their interactions with each other are similarly languid at best.
Even the addition of veterans Harris and Mirren can't do much for the offering. The former (who I still believe is one of the best actors working today) is surprisingly flat and ineffective as the villain, while the latter doesn't elicit the intended laughs playing the sardonic and domineering ex-wife to Jon Voight's henpecked character.
Harvey Keitel is an afterthought playing a returning FBI agent, Justin Bartha does the amusing sidekick bit again, and Diane Kruger once more mixes some beauty into all of the action. Although it might otherwise have seemed too easy considering he's made a living doing it, I still would have liked to have seen Cage bring more quirks and idiosyncrasies to his character -- if anything, just to make him more interesting.
I'm guessing the filmmakers -- including scribes Marianne and Cormac Wibberley -- figured the quick progression of clues being solved and leading to the next would be enough. And for some viewers that most likely will be the case. For yours truly, I just couldn't get past the preposterous material, behavior and developments, no matter how hard I tried to suspend my apparently ample disbelief. Appropriately on par with its predecessor, "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" rates as a 4 out of 10.
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