Pun Salad

More family fare. Like Spiderwick Chronicles, this is another demonstration of how pursuit of shared goals and stressful adventure can bring feuding family members together. While Spiderwick Chronicles was fantasy, filled with ogres, fairies, and trolls, National Treasure plays as a cross between Indiana Jones and Da Vinci Code. Spiderwick Chronicles was slightly more credible.

Ben Gates, played by Nicolas Cage, is flush off the well publicized success of his adventures in the previous movie; unfortunately, he's split up from his girlfriend in the previous movie. Also, his ancestor is being smeared as the grand conspirator in Lincoln's assassination by a mysterious figure with a spotty Southern accent, brandishing a page from John Wilkes Booth's diary [Ed Harris]. This puts Gates' old crew back on the hunt again, hoping to clear the family name and coincidentally to track down Cibola, the fabled lost city of gold. We rush through Paris, London, the White House, Mount Vernon, the Library of Congress, and Mount Rushmore on the way.

This is a sequel to a popular flick, and is very much a coldly prefabricated effort to cash in one more time on peoples' fond memories of that movie. Nothing is remotely credible. But the actors are all pretty good. Helen Mirren, the Queen herself, shows up as Mom; this is kind of a hoot, and she's great. I liked Justin Bartha as the sidekick previously, and he's funny here too. So, bottom line, this isn't a bad diversion for a rainy afternoon.