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Our heroes face a few perilous situations in their quest for the prize

There is a certain Indiana Jones quality to the proceedings, especially toward the end of the film, but without that brush of the transcendent or supernatural that made Indy's adventures more than just jazzed-up Saturday-matinee fare. Parallels to The Da Vinci Code also fall short in this area; whereas Dan Brown's book zips through the history of Christianity and mixes fact with fiction in order to undermine traditional understandings of the Church, this film actually leaves the surface meaning of the United States' founding documents quite intact, even as it spins a lot of hooey for the sake of a fun ride. Benjamin says that one must sometimes do what seems wrong to others in order to do what one believes to be right, and, well, if that sounds like little more than an excuse to break the law, just what does one call the American revolution against the British, anyway?

The fun thing about conspiracy thrillers, especially when they reach back thousands of years, is that they appeal to that part of us that suspects there is more to the world than we can see; they goad us into looking at the world in new ways. But National Treasure offers nothing more shocking than an invisible treasure map, and eventually, we know that the fun of solving every puzzle only to find another puzzle behind it must come to an end. If, as Benjamin's disillusioned father (Jon Voight) suggests, there is no truth to the legends, and the clues were created simply to keep the British distracted, then the mystery is hollow and serves no purpose; but if the legends are right, then the trail of clues will eventually come to an end, in a big pile of stuff, and no matter how appealing that stuff might be, it probably won't produce that same thrilling sensation of moving "further up and further in."

Snow. Trucks. Adventures. Explosions. Cool.

Still, hey, it's a treasure hunt, and it's fun to follow the clues, no matter how contrived some of them may be, or how incredibly coincidental certain plot turns might be (this is the kind of movie in which someone hoping to find a ship buried under the ice digs for just a few seconds and hits a metal plaque bearing the ship's name), or how very unlikely some of the techniques supposedly developed by America's founding fathers would seem to be.

Granted, the actors aren't in especially top form. Nearly all of them, including Harvey Keitel as a federal agent, seem to regard this movie as basically just another paycheck, and while they're all competent enough, they tend to underplay their roles, or to restrain themselves; the film's humor is pretty dry, deadpan, almost aloof at times. (Plummer, at least, brings just the right touch of hamminess to his cameo.) And riddle-solving stories like this are probably more fun to read than to watch, because you can savor the mystery's cleverness at your own pace, instead of trying to keep up with the actors.

But if you can see the film through the eyes of a relatively young boy or girl—one who can separate fact from fiction, and one who thinks a cheesy thriller is the ideal way to pick up new facts about the history of his country—then this isn't that bad a yarn, really.

Talk About It

1. In one scene, Benjamin Gates drinks a toast to "high treason" and says the American founding fathers "did what was considered wrong in order to do what they knew was right." Is this attitude consistent with Christian principles? How do we know what is right? How do we know when it is okay to break the law, or to commit "high treason"?
   
   
2. Why do you think the Knights and Freemasons left so many clues behind, if they wanted the treasure to remain hidden? Should the treasure still be kept hidden, if and when the characters find it? Of what value is a treasure that almost no one knows exists?
   
   

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