No buried treasure here.

Rating: 4/10 (8 January 2005)

If ever a movie from Walt Disney Pictures looked as if it should have come from Touchstone but turned out to be a Disney movie in the worst sense, "National Treasure" is that movie. Yes, it has the Jerry Bruckheimer stamp; yes, there are few if any children in it; yes, it has Harvey Keitel; and yes, it has some inviting shots of Diane Kruger's cleavage; but this is ultimately a pretty soft and toothless adventure tale, dressed up with major names and slick production values.
The first movie from Nicolas Cage's production company Saturn Films to star the man since "The Family Man" (he wasn't in "The Life Of David Gale"), the movie suffers from
a) Cage not seeming to take this seriously for a moment,
b) Diane Kruger confirming that her chronic blandness in "Troy" was no fluke,
c) Jon Turteltaub being just as good with action here as he was with "3 Ninjas" (i.e. not very) and additionally forgetting that he's dealing with adults this time around,
d) an unforgivably sluggish pace for what's supposed to be an exciting race around the Northeast US to find the treasure of the Knights Templar,
e) a script by Jim Kouf (woo-hoo!) and the team of Marianne Wibberley and Cormac Wibberley (d'oh!) that lets the absurdities pile up unceasingly, a drawback made even more glaring by d),
f) a lot of absolutely dreadful dialogue (alternately ridiculously expository and trying to be witty and failing),
and g) a generally neutered feel to the whole enterprise; it sometimes plays like a history lesson in lieu of a proper movie. The Indiana Jones movies are still the template for this kind of thing... and we don't even get to see Nicolas Cage freak out.
Jon Voight really, really needs to change his agent.