Quicky Film Review: National Treasure
National Treasure (2004)
Genre: Adventure/Action
Tagline: The greatest adventure history has ever revealed.
Plot Outline: A treasure hunter is in hot pursuit of a mythical treasure that has been passed down for centuries, while his employer turned enemy is onto the same path that he's on.
director: Jon Turteltaub (Phenomenon, 1996)
writing credits: 6 people (never a good sign)
produced by: Walt Disney Pictures, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Junction Entertainment, Saturn Films
starring: Nicolas Cage, Sean Bean, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel
Disney's National Treasure attempts to capture the magic from great adventure films of the past, but fails. While the film succeeds in creating a somewhat authentic action-adventure atmosphere, its awful script, poor acting and utter contempt for the intelligence of your average North American movie-goer (perhaps for good reason - see the website user scores further below) relentlessly drag it down to somewhere far south of mediocre.
Why is it that Disney, Bruckheimer and "dumbed down" are so often synonymous? To wit, what I hated most about National Treasure was the token 'sidekick' character, Riley Poole. He existed for two reasons, and two reasons only:
1) to 'crack wise.' Here is an example of the sidesplitting humour from Mr. Poole:
Abigail Chase (token, supposedly hot, female sidekick): [referring to the underground staircase] How did they build all this?
Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage's adventurer): The same way they built the pyramids
Riley Poole (annoying sidekick): Right... the aliens helped them
Almost makes me wish they had used a laugh track.
2) to explain [already obvious] plot developments, lest any soccer moms and their sedentary kids (clearly the target audience) get confused.
e.g. (paraphrasing) "wait a second - you gave [the bad guy] a fake clue so that it would throw him off the trail??? *gasp* What a great idea - now we'll be able to get to the next clue first!!"
Wow, thanks. I was wondering why you were being so helpful to the bad guys - now I understand that you were tricking them instead! Thanks, humourous sidekick character, for keeping me in the loop!
In conclusion, I recommend this movie only if you meet any of the following criteria:
- you saw Welcome to Mooseport during its opening weekend
- you are 10 years old, still stuck way back in grade 3, and you eat bugs as a hobby
- you are a Disney executive
IMDB User Rating: 6.6 out of 10
Metacritic's Metascore: 39 ("Generally negative reviews")
Metacritic's Users score: 6.8 out of 10
Rotten Tomatoes Critics: 42%
Rotten Tomatoes Users: 75%
MY RATING: 4.5 out of 10
posted by Simon @ 2:04 p.m.
2 Comments:
Assuming I keep this blog going, you'll likely see a lot of movie reviews. In fact someday I plan to complete my ranking of my top-250 movies, complete with rating out of 10 for each. So while my evaluation system is as simple as it gets (just rating according to experience and gut feel), I need at least one decimal place to help me sort through the close calls.
I rented National Treasure not knowing that it was a Disney movie (had I known that I probably would have moved on). I rented it together with some more serious movies like Hero, The Village, Hotel Rwanda - I guess I was anticipating needing a break from actually having to think or feel anything!
Consider the review a public service announcement.
"Thanks, humourous sidekick character, for keeping me in the loop!"
Gold!
Watching bad movies is improtant to maintain perspective on things. Reviewing them is important for the humour value.
Bruckheimer and Disney combined for Pirates of the Caribbean - a movie which always makes me wonder - why can't they (Disney/Bruckheimer) always make movies this good?
It's almost always the writing that lets them down in their bad movies so I can't understand why they don't just spend a few million to let it be known that Bruckheimer's looking for a new blockbuster script and then hire a small army of script reviewers to sort out the best of the hundreds of thousands of scripts which come rolling in.
I guess it's just one of life's mysteries.
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