Where to begin with this stinker? National Treasure is a film that attempts to break new ground in that, to date, great treasure-hunting movies have not to be set within the borders of the United States. There is, however, a reason for this. America is only slightly under 250 years old, and that's hardly enough time to develop any sort of historical mythos to make a lost fortune really lost. 250 years is more of the time it takes for a treasure to be misplaced. It wouldn't be wildly thrilling for Indiana Jones to be cavorting around New Jersey hunting for a gold statue. Lara Croft would never roam the Great Plains searching for the lost fortunes of a bunch of Great Plains settlers.

Nevertheless, National Treasure plows forward. The movie starts in a flashback with our hero, Benjamin Franklin Gates, as a child, being told the story of the family legacy, that of hidden treasure. That’s a serial killer's name, by the way. We then have a flashback within the flashback, which I’m sure violates some law of the space-time continuum, about the treasure, and this is where the movie begins to go wrong. The entire concept of the movie fails the simple logic test.

The treasure, as the story goes, was first discovered by six knights during the Crusades, who, upon realizing the great fortune of the treasure, decided it was too much for any one person to have, as that amount of riches would make one person much too powerful. So they decide to move it and hide it for all eternity, thus forming an alliance that would one day become the Masons (not to be confused with the Stonecutters from the Simpsons). 

Okay, let's pause and think; the *six* knights decided there was too much treasure for *one* person. Hello, guys, I’m no math genius, but I split it between the six of you! It’s called division!
 
The treasure reappears and disappears through history; every time it appears, it gets added, too. It then disappears again, always rehidden by masons. This happens mainly to give the treasure some long history since again America has a short history, and this story needs added credibility. Eventually, in colonial times, the treasure made its way to America. Yes, this massive treasure somehow made it across the Atlantic in leaky wooden ships undetected and unstolen during time of war. 

As fate would have it, many of America’s founding fathers were masons, so they decided to hide the treasure in their spare time between planning the country's framework and fighting the Revolutionary War. Never mind that the colonial army couldn’t afford real guns, uniforms, clothing, food, or other basic military necessities; we’re burying that treasure by gum and saving it for a rainy day! Just in case.

Grandpa tells the young lad he knows this because his Grandpa’s Grandpa was the stable boy for the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence and told him about it on his deathbed. Yes, several hundred years of strict cult like secrecy were revealed to the nearest stable boy. But unfortunately, he neglected to share anything more than he needed to look for something named Charlotte. Dad (played by Jon Voight) hears Grandpa telling the story and gets mad because he doesn’t want his son wasting his life like he did or his dad did. Perhaps it’s just my opinion, but if you donated your DNA to creating Angelina Jolie, that is not a life wasted.

We’re five minutes into the movie, and I’m already annoyed by the plot.

So, fast-forward to the present. A grown-up Ben Gates played by Nick Cage  yes I know him well enough to call him Nick … do you?), the guy who played Alec, the good spy turned bad, in “Goldeneye” and a bunch of flunkies are playing around on a set leftover from “The Day After Tomorrow.” They hop out of their Arctic crawlers and dig in the snow. Wouldn’t you know the first place they did? They find a copy of the book Charlotte’s Web. That would have been slightly more believable than what happened; they found the nameplate on a ship named Charlotte. Not the mast, the stern, the poop deck, or anything else; as soon as they dig in a vast arctic wasteland, they find . . . the nameplate. And that nameplate sure had some Falir to it … WOOOOOOOO.


So they get on board the Charlotte, and there’s no treasure. It's not surprising since it’s the movie's first ten minutes. However, they find a pipe, which Nick breaks to find another clue that tells them to steal the Declaration of Independence because an invisible map is on the back. Alec ponders momentarily and declares, “That makes perfect sense; they wanted to make sure the map was hidden but was on something important enough that it would be saved and protected for ever and ever.” To my surprise, that explanation makes sense, but it's the kind of a mistake they won’t make again in this movie. But Alec isn’t a good guy; he’s a secret bad guy. It’s Goldeneye all over again! He will steal the Declaration of Independence … and the only way Nick can stop it is to steal it first.
 

I’m not even going to go into how craptastic the whole breaking and entering stealing the decolatarion sequence is. But in a nutshell, Nick and his sidekick break in, battle the baddies, get the Declaration, and have the hot love interest/official declaration historian tag along as they drive to Daddy’s to try and make the invisible map visible again with the Baddies and Feds desirable on their trail. 

 
They make the map visible again, and it’s not a map. It’s a riddle and a code. The riddle tells them that the code indicates specific letters located in particular lines, on specific pages, in letters to the newspaper editor that Ben Franklin wrote when he was thirteen. 
 

This clue killed the movie for me. Nail in coffin. Dead. For four reasons. First, the founding fathers had the foresight to know that the Declaration of Independence was the most essential document of their time and would be saved forever. Coming in a close second most important was . . . letters to the editor by a catfishing thirteen-year-old Ben Franklin? Not the Constitution, not the Bill of Rights, not Common Sense, not the Articles of Friggin' Confederation. Letters to the freakin’ editor by a thirteen-year-old Ben Friggin’ Franklin. 


Second, by a strange coincidence, the original letters were at one time held by a private collector, who had no idea they were tied to the National Treasure, even though he wasted his life looking for the treasure. Yes, you guessed it; dear old dad was the proud owner of these letters. Of course, he gave them to a museum in Philadelphia so Nick couldn’t look at them immeddiately. So our hero, his sidekick, and the girl do the next logical thing, they leave Washington, D.C., and head to Philly to look at the letters firsthand, with the baddies close behind.
 

Soon after, the Feds show up at Dad’s house to figure out what’s going on and look up what the letters say on the internet. Yes, Nick Cage went to Philly, and the Feds used Google. Nick is a dumbass.
 

Fourth and finally, they figure out the code, and it tells them to look at where the shadow of the steeple of Freedom Hall points at exactly 2:30 for the next clue. Sadly, Nick checks his watch at 2:45. They’ll have to wait till tomorrow. Then Sidekick remembers that in 1776 there was no daylight savings time, so they still had 45 minutes to get there. So they’re compensating for daylight savings time but not the tilt of the earth that comes with changing seasons. I will admit that, in the movie, being pointed to a general area would have worked, but then why mention/compensate for daylight savings time? This is not to say that their adjustment for daylight savings time completely wouldn’t have worked anyway because, in 1776, there was no way to standardize time, and time was, at best, a localized guesstimate. 
 

I’m done with this review. I simply can’t go on. That’s a mere half of the movie. From this point on out, the plot is convoluted, and I could barely even follow it, let alone explain it to someone. I simply can’t stomach that they want us to believe that Ben Franklin drew an invisible map on the back of the Declaration of Independence, moved and hid a Kajillion-dollar treasure (and clues to find it) all over colonial America by horse. In his spare time helped found the country, invented bifocals, discovered electricity, wrote an Almanac, was ambassador to France, and all the other crap he did. Ben Franklin was too freakin’ brilliant to come up with such lame-ass clues, period. You can either ignore all the science and history when writing a movie, or you can completely ignore it on the most surface level, but sprinkling in just enough to point out the flaws in the movie does NOT work. The movie is “Ernest Saves the DaVinci Code,” but not quite wise. 

The movie is crapadelic. I have no idea how this move spawned two sequels and a TV series. Its plot holes are more significant than those of Titanic (both the movie plot and the actual ship). There is no believability that this could actually happen. It shouldn’t surprise you that the other writing credits the writer of this movie have include the Cuba Gooding/Talking Dog flick “Snow Dogs.” 

That said, I can offer only one suggestion to improve the movie. At the end of the film, when they are in the cavern with the gold statues, the gold coins, and other various gold treasures, one of them should reach out, touch a statue, and exclaim, “This isn’t real gold … it’s just gold foil – and inside is rich dark milk chocolate. It’s even better than I imagined!” 

Yes, I realize that makes no sense, but neither does the rest of the movie. 


National Treasure is available streaming on Disney.