National Treasure 2 Review

I'm back with another great movie review! This time it is National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets. I, being a history buff, enjoyed the first National Treasure immensely. It contained a cool story, a hot girl and a funny dude. What more can you ask for? The 2nd one? Well . . .

I guess it can be satisfying saying that National Treasure 2 was exactly what I thought it was going to be. (I am going to pass at a golden opportunity to make a Denny Green jokes). It was a lesser, hastily put together version of the first and it was not very good.

The movie starts off with Ben Gates (Nick Cage) getting some shocking news from Mitch Wilkinson (Ed Harris) that his great grandfather, Thomas Gates, was the mastermind behind the assassination of President Lincoln. Ben Gates than sets out to prove his great grandfather's innocence. The movie seems like it is going to go into historical detail about Abraham Lincoln, but it doesn't. In fact this movie has pretty much nothing to do with Lincoln outside of the opening sequence. It ends up being a race to find the City of Gold (wasn't that the plot of the last one) that will help clear Thomas Gates' name, although they don't go into great detail how. Ben Gates returns with all his friends from the last one; Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) and Patrick Gates (the always awesome Jon Voight).

The movie lacks the charm of the first one, in fact it feels like a tired rehashing of the first one. For all the humor Riley brought to the first one, he really isn't that funny in the second one. Ben and Abigail are having relationship problems that predictably get solved during the treasure hunt (sorry I gave it away, but if you didn't see this coming anyway, you might have a low IQ). The plot is even less believable than the first one, and the final climatic scenes where they are navigating through caves seems like it was cut and pasted from a dungeon in one of the Legend of Zelda games. All the noble history references that were so cool in the first one seem so played out in this one. There are parts in the movie that lack imagination, as if the script was hurried out. It is kind of sad, but it is exactly what I expected.

Grade: C