A Guilty Pleasure

Rating: 7/10 (13 May 2008)

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I wanted to hate this movie, I truly did. I put it on hoping to be subject to a big budget piece of crap that I could tear to shreds. Nick Cage is a guy that makes himself easy to hate: loud, obnoxious, hammy, bad hair plugs and a career thanks to nepotism. But on the flip side, he's been in some great films and was hard not to love in those roles: Vampire's Kiss, Rumblefish, Birdy, Wild at Heart and guilty pleasures Face Off and The Rock. Even recently he's done some respectable work: The Weatherman and Lord of War. But before I get completely off track, I just finished watching National Treasure: Book of Secrets ...and, reluctantly, I liked it.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't a great movie, but when you've got three academy award winners (Cage, Jon Voight, Helen Mirren) along with Harvey Keitel, Ed Harris and Bruce Greenberg, you can't help but at least consider it a great popcorn movie. OK, name recognition aside, Ed Harris is not worth mentioning here since he mails in a lazy performance where it seems the director (notorious hack John Turteltaub) kept forgetting to remind Harris he started the movie speaking with a faux southern drawl.
Overall, NT is a hybrid of Indiana Jones and The DaVinci Code, so much so you can imagine exactly how the pitch went down in some studio execs office. What makes this movie work are many of the same things that made Indy and DaVinci work: pseudo-historical facts, conspiracy theories, puzzles, riddles, suspenseful life or death consequences in secret chambers and a mother lode at the end of the exhaustive trail.
No this isn't high art. No this film is barely worth the effort I'm putting forth to write about it. This movie was fun: it invited me to participate in the puzzle solving, it revisited some interesting historical periods and it whet my appetite for some fascinating, clandestine conspiratorial details. At worst, this movie is a lazy parents excuse to educate kids with what would otherwise be found in boring history textbooks. What else would you expect from Disney?