I have to give NATIONAL TREASURE this... it's a landmark in my movie viewing habits. An hour into it, something very rare and unprecedented happened, something I never thought would consume me. Exactly one hour into NATIONAL TREASURE, I stopped giving a damn. I wanted to leave the theater. For the first time, I didn't want to be in front of a screen that's bestowed me with many wonderful memories. I thought about work I needed to do before the weekend. I thought about the recent election. I thought about fantasy basketball. I thought about everything but this insipid waste of film that was unspooling in front of me, assasinating brain cells like a grey-haired Tom Cruise on a hot summer night.
Nothing matters in this damn movie. Nothing is organic. It seems that out of all American studio movies, 3/4's of them are sequels and remakes, and the others are "original" ideas that consist of placing a few keywords (ex. "treasure", "love interest", "explosion", "Nicolas Cage") in a word processor device that proceeds to print out screenplays.
NATIONAL TREASURE is just the latest to use that formula, to the point where I finally got sick of it. I got sick of the bombastic music cues. I got sick of the lame comic relief. I got sick of the wastes of onscreen talent like Harvey Keitel. I got sick of the last minute escapes. I got sick of Jerry Bruckheimer's Hollywood, which has become more encompassing than anyone earlier in his career would have forecasted.
Nic Cage's character exists because this movie needs a protagonist. Diane Kruger, so beautiful here, exists because a love interest is needed. Sean Bean exists because these pictures need villains. Justin Bartha, the 'tard from GIGLI, blew a hundred more Disney executives so that he could be the one that makes this movie "funny." Nobody else makes much of a difference.
The plot involves the search for a massive treasure that our founding fathers have apparently foolishly hidden from the rest of the country, particularly through some of our nation's most trying economic times. Cage is the fortuitously named Benjamin Franklin Gates, a lifelong treasure hunter (apparently, this is a successful profession) who lets it slip to collegue Sean Bean that there are clues to the treasure hidden behind ther Declaration of Independence.
The trailers would have you believe that the crux of the film is the theft of the Declaration of Independence. However, the trailers apparently only show the first thirty or so minutes of this tediously paced film, and after the document is stolen, it's merely a pitstop on the way to more inane clues that enable Nic Cage to furrow his brow like some sort of idiot savant. Indeed, watching Nic Cage cinematically think could be worth the price of admission, because it's so improbable that there could be thought behind any words emerging from his mouth.
These characters have no context and do not exist outside of the film. There is no development, no understanding of who the hell they are or what they were doing before finding themselves in the middle of this ludicrous plot. Bruckheimer exposition, stupid stuff like, "You haven't been the same since your mother died" is absent here, and there is absolutely no effort to make these characters anything beyond adventure movie automatons.
It's only appropriate that this film be directed by an automaton, Jon Turtletaub. Turtletaub has been responsible for some of the most uninspiring cinematic crap of our time, including "3 Ninjas", "Phenomenon" and "Instinct". Some filmmakers dabble in varying subject matter because they are adept at telling different types of stories, Turtletaub does it because he's good at nothing. This is likely the biggest budget he's ever worked with, and it shows. Action scenes are incoherent, body doubles are easily distinguishable and there is no sense of time or space in between scenes to the point where the movie is stitched together incomprehensibly without any narrative rhythm whatsoever.
Most troubling are the continued Hollywood archetypes of anyone in an action movie that isn't a white male. In Bruckheimer's universe, specifically in this movie, women are only present to indulge men in their childhood fantasies. The fact that this is a PG film only makes Diane Kruger an accessory to a boy's dream, not by removing her shirt but by turning skepticism into blind, stupid faith that powers the motor that is the men's improbable set of ludicrous, dangerous plans. And how should one feel about a scene in which a man named Benjamin Franklin gives a young black child one dollar to run through visibly rought traffic in order to jot down letters from a national monument? If the filmmakers realized the subtext of such a scene, shame on them. If they didn't, well... err... I didn't vote for Bush.
NATIONAL TREASURE pats itself on the back for being aware of history and is a celebration of white imperialism at it's core. Ignore that subtext, and it's also a dreadfully incompetent action movie, the kind of crap that sadly people like Nic Cage have to do in order to produce a MATCHSTICK MEN or ADAPTATION in their spare time, the kind of movie that should have been outdated twenty years ago. It's crap in every single way, disengaging, heartless and with no faith in humanity.
Congratulations, Jerry Bruckheimer. You haven't killed my love for movies just yet, but you may have knifed it in the sphincter.
