National Horror: Book of Secrets

Rating: 2/10 (30 December 2007)

I'm generally a fan of these kinds of topics that include history and some puzzle riddles. I enjoyed reading Da Vinci Code and a variety of Clive Cussler/James Rollins books. I also saw the first National Treasure and though I wasn't thrilled, it wasn't a horrible movie.
*SPOILER WARNING* Then Disney had to do a sequel.
The good: As pretty much everyone has mentioned, the best part was the Goofy cartoon. Truth be told, the concept of hunting for Cibola was a decent concept too. I'll also give Helen Mirren some props for being a bit of an interesting character.
The bad: The problems I had with the first National Treasure are even more prevalent in this one. Here you have a father (Voight), son (Cage), and a museum curator (Kruger) all for protecting history and yet have a habit of destroying historical artifacts. Fold up the Declaration of Independence? Sure. Throw an example of rare Native American hieroglyphs into the river? Yep, you bet.
Of course, before tossing the hieroglyphs, it took a 5+ minute car chase where _nothing_ happens except repeated shots of a certain automobile maker's logo being pictured on every single turn and captured by the traffic camera.
Also, it makes me feel safe knowing that the Queen's study, the Oval Office and the Library of Congress are so easy to break into. And if I ever get the chance to kidnap the president, it's nice to know he's the kind of guy who will allow me unescorted and unrestricted access to see the nation's secrets. Yep, that "Book of Secrets", the title of the movie, takes up as much screen (and plot time) as the opening credits... and much less than the car chase. But it provides a convenient segue to a sequel around page 47 of the book of secrets. Maybe it was the plot summary? So now, off to Mt. Rushmore which was built to obscure some landmarks (which weren't hinted at in any of the clues) on a map (which also wasn't in any of the clues, nor found)... OK, so our intrepid adventurers are in the middle of the Black Hills, though it's not quite clear whether they're actually on top of Mt. Rushmore or not. Let's assume they are on Mt. Rushmore, narrowing the search area from around 600 sq miles (the area of the Black Hills) to Mt. Rushmore which is a few square miles. So, they become enlightened when they realize water turns rocks darker... (not to mention clothes, and pretty much everything else) Lo and behold, they happen to find the exact spot. Some puzzle solving, huh? They're now on their way to Cibola. (That's assuming, of course, that no one had read a 6th grade history textbook about how Cibola wasn't that far north).
Then, after some funky physics on a huge stone platform built inside a carved-out mountain by Stone Age tech Native Americans, a bit of flooding, one of our "defenders of history" rips up a 5 ft by 5 ft gold brick out of the ground _with_one_hand_ and tosses it in his backpack.
Seriously, this movie made Sahara look plausible (even if you hadn't read the book).
Enough about the plot... as far as acting goes, I remember a time when Nicholas Cage was the future of acting. I just don't see how a guy can go from 8mm or Lord of War, to movies like this and Ghost Rider. You could almost hear the drum roll before and after Justin Bartha delivered one of his zillion one-liners, but it was pretty silent. Kruger's character behaves exactly opposite of how an educated lady who has an ex-boyfriend break into her house should... then again, considering how roughly she treated the Declaration of Independence in the first movie, I shouldn't be surprised about her make-out session on the floor of the Oval Office. The one I feel worst for is Ed Harris, whose character had multiple personalities and all of them were bland. It was almost like the writers were trying so hard not to use a villain similar to the first National Treasure... but then they'd occasionally realize they needed a villain to keep the plot moving. Ed Harris should know better than to take these kinds of roles... maybe that's why he dropped his accent by the end of the movie.
If you made it this far, perhaps you think I obsessed too much about the plot holes, the blatant disrespect of historical artifacts. That should be a sign that the movie did not catch my attention. Hey, the movie "300" isn't historically accurate, but not only was it entertaining, it also didn't try to pass itself off as legit with monsters and golden-skinned Persian emperors.
The scary thing about a movie like National Treasure 2 is that people will watch it and think that's how historians, archaeologists and even private treasure hunters act. They'll probably spout off the same cliché one-liners too.