Review: National Treasure – Book of Secrets

I won’t lie to you, National Treasure: Book of Secrets isn’t worth seeing and I’m just not in the mood for making excuses. It’s bland, unexciting, uninvolving; really just a copy of the original, which was a copy of the Da Vinci Code, which was a copy of some other book which there was a lawsuit about.

Nicolas Cage (possibly the most unappealing actor, anyone?) plays Benjamin Franklin Gates, a treasure-hunter who would like to be Indiana Jones but just comes off as a weird guy in a toupee. Diane Kruger is the brain-meltingly boring blonde love interest who shows no spark of anything whatsoever. And what is Harvey Keitel doing here? He’s in it for two minutes as an irrelevant FBI agent. Helen Mirren, too, tarnishes her reputation by simply appearing in this trash.

To be fair, there were two bits that I liked. The first was a car chase through central London which involves a truck bearing down on our heroes, smashing any signage or shop fronts which get in the way. The second was a sequence set on a precariously balanced platform in a cavern – get too close to one edge and the platform will topple over. Both of these are fun and adventurous, much like the ending, where they discover a hidden cave full of golden stuff that reminded me of The Goonies.

Unfortunately the rest of the film lamely strings together history that I learnt in Form One social studies. The scriptwriters must have read the same text book. In fact, judging by the banal simplicity of it all, they probably just glanced at the contents page.

For instance, why have a scene Buckingham Palace? Why not some scummy old bookshop in a back alley in South London? Which would be more interesting? It’s just a lazy way to mock English customs. There are still cup-of-tea jokes a’plenty. It’s a wonder that no-one says ‘Guvnor’ at any stage, although Cage has a painfully unfunny scene where he speaks in a Mockney accent to irritate a guard.

I sat there in the cinema wondering why I wasn’t engaging with the film. I couldn’t really pinpoint any specifics. It’s really just that Book of Secrets is so cookie-cutter bland, so vanilla, so cardboard, that it just made me tired. Please don’t bother watching this film. It will only encourage them to make more.