National Treasure: This, my friends, is a very silly movie. It tries to be Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code: Nicolas Cage plays a man attempting to find an ancient treasure which was hidden from the British back in the Revolutionary War, the map to which is supposedly on the back of the Declaration of Independence. Believe it or not, the premise is far from the most ridiculous part of this film.
I laughed every time someone pulled a fact or a theory out of thin air and it ended up being exactly the correct interpretation of the clue (apparently practice makes perfect: they took 30 years to puzzle out the meaning of “the secret lies with charlotte” and maybe a week to get the rest). I laughed even harder at the logical errors: more than once I wondered, “How would he have known about that?” Ah, but the biggest was the scientific errors. My personal favorite was the clocktower, the shadow of which was supposed to fall on the location of some vital clue when the clock struck a certain time. However, what the writers failed to realize is that the Earth travels around the sun: the clocktower’s shadow would only fall in that precise location at that particular time of day once a year. How lucky for Nicolas Cage that he happened to show up just at the right time.
Ah, but it was a fun movie. Surprisingly few explosions (for a Bruckheimer film) but plenty of amusing banter and entertaining plot holes. It’s cheesy and formulaic, in that I called the Love Interest, the Witty Sidekick, and whenever something was about to explode or otherwise fall apart at the Worst Possible Moment, but National Treasure remains a solidly entertaining film.
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