What has happened to Nicolas Cage? Ever since super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer first got hold of him with 1996's The Rock, he's been the go-to guy for mindless action duds (Con Air, Gone in Sixty Seconds) and syrupy melodramas (Captain Corelli's Mandolin, The Family Man). Sure, he's done some work on quirky, smaller films, like Spike Jonze's Adaptation and Ridley Scott's underrated Matchstick Men, but most of his career in the last decade has been about empty blockbusters. For his fourth team-up with Bruckheimer, Cage barely breaks a sweat as historian/action hero Ben Gates in the ludicrous "thriller" National Treasure. Like an episode of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? with explosions and car chases, National Treasure posits a secret conspiracy by the Founding Fathers, members of both the Freemasons and the Knights Templar, to bury a treasure of enormous financial and historical value and then leave lots of esoteric clues so that someday someone could find it. Why did they bury it? Because it was too much for one person to be trusted with, says Ben. Why did they leave clues? So that one person could someday find it. Does this make sense? No.
Neither does anything else in the film, in which Ben and his comic-relief sidekick Riley (Justin Bartha) scheme to steal the Declaration of Independence because it has a treasure map hidden on the back. They're dogged at every turn by the evil Ian (Sean Bean), Ben's one-time associate who only wants the treasure for his own vaguely nefarious purposes. Luckily, they have sexy historian Dr. Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger) to look pretty and provide key insights when things get rough.
National Treasure wants very badly to be the American history version of an Indiana Jones film, all exciting treasure hunts and quippy heroes, but it doesn't even achieve the entertainment level of Angelina Jolie's Tomb Raider. Everyone involved seems to be moving on autopilot, especially Cage, who's got to be bored of these Action Nerd roles by now, and director Jon Turteltaub, the force behind such contrived melodramas as The Kid, Phenomenon and Instinct, here reduced to a Bruckheimer puppet who can't even stage a coherent action sequence.
Worst of all, the movie takes more than two hours to get us exactly where we expected to go from seeing the trailer, and doesn't manage anything close to excitement or humor along the way. Not that you'd expect anything less from Bruckheimer—leave it to him to turn the wonders of history into a crass action movie.