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National Treasure Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG (for action violence and some scary images) Theater release: November 19, 2004 by Walt Disney Pictures Directed by: Jon Turteltaub Runtime: 1 hour 40 minutes Cast: Nicolas Cage (Ben Gates), Diane Kruger (Abigail Chase), Harvey Keitel (Sadusky), Justin Bartha (Riley Poole), Sean Bean (Ian Howe), Christopher Plummer (John Adams Gates) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

About eight years ago, something happened to Nicolas Cage. Known until then as an offbeat but fascinating charactor actor, Cage won an Oscar for playing an alcoholic who literally drinks himself to death in Leaving Las Vegas—and then he suddenly turned into an action hero. Many, but not all, of Cage's onscreen adventures since then have been produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, including the R-rated action movies The Rock and Con Air and the PG-13 heist flick Gone in 60 Seconds. But now, with National Treasure—a PG-rated romp through the relics, myths and legends surrounding America's founding fathers—Cage and Bruckheimer have set their sights on a younger, and perhaps less critical, audience. This film is being released as a full-fledged Walt Disney picture, and unlike some of Cage's more intense flicks, this one has the benign villains and occasionally silly sensibility of those films Disney used to churn out back in the '70s and show as two-parters on their Sunday-night "Wonderful World of Disney." The main difference is, this new film has bigger stars and a bigger budget.

Nicolas Cage plays the adventurer Benjamin Franklin Gates

Seen in that light, National Treasure can be enjoyed as preposterous fun, even when you sense that the cast and crew are just going through the motions. Cage plays Benjamin Franklin Gates, the latest in a long line of men who have shared an incredible secret going back centuries and transmitted from one generation to the next. The first time we see Benjamin, he is a preteen boy rummaging through his grandfather's attic—and when his grandfather (Christopher Plummer) finds him there, he sits the lad down, tells him he's probably old enough now to hear the family story, and proceeds to tell him the tall, tall tale of a vast, unimaginable treasure that was amassed by the ancient Egyptian and Roman empires, and which the Knights Templar found in Jerusalem during the Crusades.

One might assume these soldiers would have been happy to keep the plunder for their own vain purposes, but no, these knights decided to protect the treasure; and so, between them and the Freemasons, the existence of the treasure was kept secret, while the treasure itself was smuggled to North America, and the United States' national documents and monuments were peppered with clues to the treasure's hiding place. That all-seeing eye hovering over the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill? That clock at Independence Hall on the back of the hundred-dollar bill? All these things contain secrets, planted there by the founding fathers. And as Benjamin grows up, he dedicates his life to following the clues—even though it means racing against dastardly rival treasure hunters and skeptical police officers and the like. It's all rather like The Da Vinci Code, but without the sacrilege.

Abigail (Diane Kruger) and Ben (Cage) look for clues

The first half of the film revolves mostly around the Declaration of Independence, the back of which, Benjamin discovers, has an invisible map. Ian Howe (Sean Bean), a former benefactor and current rival of Benjamin's, plans to steal the Declaration for his own selfish gain, and since none of the authorities in Washington believe Benjamin when he tries to warn them, Benjamin decides he must steal it first in order to protect it. (The words "Declaration of Independence" are used so often in this film, you begin to suspect the screenwriters dedicated a special button on their keyboard to that phrase.)

Benjamin and his computer-whiz partner Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) carry out the heist with the help of high-tech equipment, the effect of which is enhanced by the film's own reliance on that annoying modern stylistic tic of fast-forwarding through short bursts of film, instead of building a straightforward montage out of straightforward cuts. Their plan goes fairly smoothly, until a National Archives exec named Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger) is kidnapped by Ian and his men—and so, with the police on their tail, Benjamin and Riley have to save the girl and keep the Declaration of Independence out of Ian's hands and track down the rest of the clues while staying "off the grid." As a result, the rest of the film is less about fancy gizmos and more about deciphering riddles and following shadows at certain times of day and looking for tunnels behind centuries-old coffins.

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