Starring: Nicolas Cage, Harvey Keitel, Jon Voight and Diane Kruger
Director: Jon Turteltaub
Rated: PG
DAN Brown proved that you can make a lot of money from producing a page-turner with a little bit of fact, and a massive dose of fiction passed off as fact.
The screenwriters of National Treasure, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio and Cormac Wibberley and Marianne Wibberley, worship at The Da Vinci Code’s altar.
Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) takes up his family’s career of finding a lost treasure in the US.
His clan has been looking for six generations.
The story goes that among the founding fathers of the US were Freemasons, who were descendants of the Knight Templars.
These masonry knights brought with them from Europe a vast treasure and promptly buried it for safekeeping.
The Gates family has been looking ever since.
Ben is joined in the hunt by the initially doubting but aptly named Dr Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), the US’s chief archivist, and his techno sidekick Riley Poole (Justin Bartha).
This trio has to steal the Declaration of Independence before the evil British billionaire Ian Howe (Sean Bean) beats them to it.
It is alleged that on the back of the declaration they will find the key as to the treasure’s whereabouts. FBI agent Sadusky (Harvey Keitel) gives chase.
National Treasure is decent matinee fare. It is well shot, has a good music score, some taut scenes and a couple of excellently directed and edited chase sequences. But that is it.
The story is too far-fetched, the acting from a good cast, is pretty one-dimensional, and the conspiracy in the story is even too convoluted for the most ardent conspiracy theorist.
The nagging problem in the narrative is why did the founding fathers bury this treasure in the first place, and why would its discovery cause such harm? By film’s end we are none the wiser.
