Well, way back on New Year's Day, my whole family started 2008 off right. My Lovely Wife went to a yoga class (no easy feat with a still-healing broken ankle, but she's made of very strong stuff) while the kids and I took in National Treasure: Book of Secrets.
All of us loved it. As the kids get older, this is an increasingly uncommon phenomenon. Usually at least one of the kids will dislike the movie, or else they all like it and I want to hang myself. But this one really was fun for the whole family (well, the 80% of the family that attended), which probably explains its financial success.
Some things I liked about it:
1. )I love it when filmmakers are smart enough to hire a supporting cast that can actually act. Jon Voigt, Helen Mirren, and Ed Harris: all very good actors who elevate the material, and quite possibly everybody else's performances. I don't hang with professional actors, but I'm guessing if you're doing a scene with Helen Mirren, you bring your A game so you don't wind up looking stupid on screen.
2.) The heroes are nonviolent. Nobody's made a big deal of this, but it really is incredibly refreshing. The heroes use their wits and knowledge of history and computers to get by. The films aren't exactly nonviolent, in that our heroes are shot at, etc., but they don't win by hurting people. Now, this is coming from someone who counts Drunken Master 2 among his favorite movies, so I'm by no means against violent movies, but there are so few action movies that are genuinely thrilling in which the heroes don't hurt people that it makes the National Treasure movies remarkable.
3.)It's unashamedly corny. Perhaps another sign that the Age of Irony is coming to an end. Nicolas Cage's character has a genuine passion for American History, and the plot turns on his unfeigned, unironic desire to clear his great-grandfather's name. Villain Ed Harris is motivated by a similar take on family honor. Now, as for me, I could give a shit about my great grandfather's name, but my personal family tree has more than one "drunk and abusive" branch, so maybe I'm not a good example. Even still, I found the characters' belief in this corny ideal to be charming. Similarly, when Gates tells the President that he believes he's an honorable man simply by virtue of the fact that he's President of the United States, it was all I could do not to laugh aloud. But the script beat me to it. "Nobody believes that stuff anymore, Gates," POTUS says. "But they want to believe it, sir," Gates replies.
I admit it-- I rolled my eyes at that line. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it might be true. People do want to believe that their presidents, like the one in this movie, are intelligent and honorable, especially after nearly eight years of neither, and twelve years before that of intelligent but not especially honorable.
