[Movie 79 / Day 47]
For pure enjoyment, the National Treasure movies are hard to beat. It's like Indiana Jones met The Da Vinci Code in a dirty bar, had a knee-trembler in the back alley by the dustbins and 9 months later, Nicolas Cage was cast as a treasure hunter extraordinaire.
Following on from the first movie, Book of Secrets deals with another hidden treasure, this time a Native American 'City of Gold'. Cage has to clear his great-great-(great?)-grandfather's name and in order to do this, has to find the fabled City to prove his ancestor was a stand up guy after all. In the course of the hunt, we visit Paris, break into Buckingham Palace and the Oval Office and kidnap the president.
All of the original cast return and we get a shiny new bad guy in the gruff form of Ed Harris.
It's nothing special, and yes there are bits that stretch the suspension of disbelief you need for a movie like this (mostly technical things in my case, like a traffic camera taking a massively high resolution picture, or the zoom on the model helicopter). Having said that, it's much, much better than Indy 4 and it's one of those movies that's just fun to watch. I hope they make a third (and they left it open for one with the mysterious 'Page 47' chat with the president).
It's a pity that George Lucas didn't sit down and watch the National Treasures before he sat down and ruined the Indiana Jones movies.
My rating: 7.1 / 10
IMDB rating: 6.6 / 10
Running time: 124 mins
IMDB link
