National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Review by Peter T. Chattaway | posted 12/21/2007
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The men who drafted the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and various other documents back in the 18th century are often called the "founding fathers" of the United States of America. But it has also been argued that the United States did not really come into its own as a country until the 19th century, when it endured the horrors of the Civil War; it was this conflict, rather than the Revolution, which was dubbed "The Birth of a Nation" by legendary silent film director D.W. Griffith.
A similar view is expressed early on by Nicolas Cage's character, Benjamin Gates, in National Treasure: Book of Secrets, the sequel to the most successful movie Cage has ever made. And it makes sense that this budding series should leap from a story about George Washington and all his friends to a brand new mystery that takes the assassination of Abraham Lincoln as its starting point. Washington led thirteen colonies in breaking away from the British homeland, whereas Lincoln held on to those states that tried to break away from the resulting republic—and these films, in which our heroes are always breaking into places and stealing things but generally doing so for the good of the country, capture something of that fine balancing act between subverting authority and respecting it at the same time.
Nicolas Cage as Benjamin Gates
The motives of Benjamin Gates are not so pure this time, though. In the first film, he was a treasure hunter who was motivated as much by patriotism—the need to protect national relics—as by the need to prove that the crazy story handed down to him by his grandfather was true. This time, however, the outrageous things he does are primarily motivated by a desire to defend the honor of his great-great-grandfather—and while his quest does take him to bigger and better things, that initial impulse is not so easy to justify. A matter of national security, it isn't.
When last we saw Benjamin, he and his new girlfriend, National Archives executive Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), had found the treasure of the Knights Templar and used it to buy a swanky new mansion. But as the second film begins, Benjamin and Abigail have had a falling out, and she has kicked him out of the house ("You can have the Boston Tea tables," says Benjamin as they divide the furniture), so now he lives again with his once-skeptical father Patrick (Jon Voight). When we first see them, Benjamin and Patrick are giving a lecture on the diary of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth and the 18 pages that are mysteriously missing from it. But no sooner have they raised the subject, than a man named Mitch Wilkinson (Ed Harris) stands up and reveals that he has one of the missing pages in his hands—and it seems to implicate Benjamin's great-great-grandfather in the assassination.
Benjamin and Abigail (Diane Kruger) checking out another artifact
Benjamin refuses to believe that his ancestor had anything to do with the conspiracy against Lincoln, and so he sets out to prove the man's innocence. And this, in turn, requires him to visit Paris, sneak into Buckingham Palace, snoop around the Oval Office, and visit various other places in search of real-life artifacts that would be quite fascinating in their own right even if they weren't hiding secrets. And along the way, Benjamin again teams up not only with computer-whiz sidekick Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) and his estranged girlfriend Abigail, who can never resist a good mystery, but he also gets his mother, a British expert in Native American history named Emily Appleton (Helen Mirren), to help out—and since she left his father three decades earlier, that means there are two bickering, separated couples on this journey.
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