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National Treasure- 11/19/04 - PG - 131m
Nicolas Cage - Ben Gates
Diane Kruger - Abigail Chase
Justin Bartha - Riley Poole
Director: Jon Turteltaub
Screenplay by: Cormac and Marianne Wibberley
Studio: Disney
Official
Website
LYN
Nutshell: There’s a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence.
Okay, there’s a little bit more to it than that…but not much. See, there’s this guy named Ben Gates whose grandfather John Adams Gates (Christopher Plummer) told little Ben the story of this immense treasure that has been secured by secret societies throughout the ages. And that their family was supposedly entrusted with a key (of sorts) to its sacred location, or how to basically start looking for it. “But if it’s so sacred, then why give anyone the key to find it, shouldn’t its location die with the person whom last knew how to find it?”
Anyway…Apparently John Gates spent his life looking for it with little success, and by the attitude Ben’s father Patrick Gates (Jon Voight) was giving his father when Patrick discovered his father telling little Ben the story, you could tell he might have spent a couple hours or two looking for it himself.
So there you have it, there’s the set –up. Two generations (or more) of treasure-hunters with nothing to show for it, and now the family business (or obsession) gets passed along to next generation of failed treasure-hunters. But then again little Ben Gates is none other than ‘Nicolas Cage’, so “Nick, Nick…he’s our man…if he can’t do it…nobody can… um…yeah.”
Now fast forward to present day and we find the “Nutshell” comment to be true…then the film just kind of falls apart after that. For me it was because I find it extremely hard to believe that a document of such importance, a true “National Treasure” could be stolen so easily, by anyone. Then there after I found myself asking the same question over and over again… “Huh?” I consider myself a reasonably intelligent man (not as smart as Ben Gates…apparently) but some of the clues they were getting didn’t make much sense…like “How did you figure that out since there was no clue to lead you in that direction?” Not to mention how the “Declaration of Independence” was taken in the first place. Not to back-step, but apparently you just walk in and take it….it’s just that easy, and that whole sequence just truly bothered me.
But I think that’s the point I’m trying to make, the film lost my interest very early on, and never got it back. After which, anything that happened remotely close to being nonsensical, just got torn to pieces, and no matter what I say from this point on would be simply out of contempt for the film, and that’s not too cool, so…
Lyn
