Seems like we've been here before

Rating: 6/10 (28 May 2009)

Time for the inevitable National Treasure sequel and your feelings about this movie should pretty much reflect your feelings about the first one. If you liked the original you'll like this. If the first movie didn't do it for you well then there's nothing for you here because it's basically the same movie all over again. It's a pretty simple formula really. Take a movie which made hundreds of millions of dollars, add a couple of European locations, toss in a dash of Ed Harris and a dollop of Helen Mirren and then sit back and collect further hundreds of millions of dollars.
The sequel does on the surface seem slightly more plausible than the original but that's really not saying much. Our heroes won't have to steal the Declaration of Independence this time. But they will have to take apart the Queen of England's desk, sneak into the Oval Office and kidnap someone who quite simply cannot be kidnapped. And of course they'll also need to get their hands on the Book of Secrets because that is after all the name of the movie. What's in that Book of Secrets? Well, it's a secret. But it's safe to say there will be more treasure to be found because apparently we didn't discover enough treasure in the first movie. I anxiously await National Treasure 50 by which point I'm sure we will have learned that you can find billions of dollars worth of gold buried somewhere in each of the fifty states if only you have Nicolas Cage to help you look for it.
Cage of course plays the central role of treasure hunter Ben Gates and he's surrounded by much of the same cast as last time around. Jon Voight again plays Ben's father, Diane Kruger his love interest and Justin Bartha his treasure-hunting sidekick. Cage, Voight and Kruger are really no better or worse than the first time around. Bartha's character is much less annoying this time. After trying so desperately hard to be funny, and failing miserably at it, in the first film the character fits much better in this movie. All of those groan-inducing one-liners Bartha was forced to spout in the first movie have been removed. Well, most of them anyway. The two new roles of any significance are taken up by Harris as the villain and Mirren as Ben's mother. Harris is somewhat surprisingly bland in his bad guy role. Adding Mirren was a nice touch however and she plays off of Cage and Voight very well. The fact Ben's mother happens to be one of the few people on the planet capable of interpreting one of the clues is either convenient or contrived, I'm not quite sure which.
Anyhow Ben Gates and friends proceed pretty much exactly as they did in the first movie. Decipher some clues, avoid the bad guy, decipher some more clues, avoid the bad guy again, try not to get killed by ancient treasure-protecting booby traps. It really is the same exact thing we saw the first time. But that's not all bad. The plot is reasonably engrossing and entertaining. There are some nice action moments, some decent touches of humor here and there. It's a movie that was never meant to be taken particularly seriously. For what it is it works. More or less.