Five-Star Three-Star Cinema Club #2: National Treasure
A few words about "American history"
Welcome to my recurring Five-Star Three-Star cinema club column, in which I am out in search of that rare delight: the five-star three-star movie. Inspired by my post about 1996’s Twister, and expanded upon in a follow-up post, the idea here is to build out a canon of movies that are not exactly great, and certainly not transcendent, but are great at being the exact kind of perfect mediocrity you sometimes crave on a Sunday afternoon.
These posts are ordinarily for paid subscribers only, but I’m making this entry available as a free sample. If you like what you read and would like to keep up with the series, and other series, like my recent diversion into Late Eastwood, please considering signing up for a paid subscription.
Check out the inaugural entry, on The Siege, here.
Every time I watch a movie, I think to myself, Is this better than National Treasure? The answer is usually, “No.”
On the hunt for the next possible entry into the Five-Star Three-Star canon, I weighed several options spanning several decades. While I’m sure I’ll get to more than a few of them over time (I’m keeping a list), I was reminded this week of a true favourite of mine: National Treasure. I’ve seen it many, many times. Ignoring all the animated Disney movies I wore out on VHS in my childhood, National Treasure has got to be one of my most-watched movies. I still remember being in high school, with a bootleg DVD of the film I got at Pacific Mall, using my lunch breaks over several days to rewatch the film with another friend who loved it on the eMac in the Comm Tech room. I’ve seen it so many times, I can practically recite whole scenes. I love National Treasure.
Much as I love the movie, though, you’d never catch me arguing it’s actually “great,” whatever that means. There’s a reason the movie is referenced more often as a joke than anything else; the scene in which Nicholas Cage says, “I’m gonna steal it. I’m gonna steal the Declaration of Independence,” has become something like a meme over the last two decades. National Treasure is a patently ridiculous movie. The Knights Templar collected a vast treasure of loot from across centuries of global conflict, and eventually, through the Masons, stashed it somewhere in the continental United States. Several of the Founding Fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, were in on it, hiding clues to the location of the treasure, with one family of treasure hunters seeking it out for generations in order to… protect it? Cage is Benjamin Franklin Gates, who refuses to let go of the idea that the treasure is real, wanting to do right by his grandfather. He’s betrayed by a wealth British criminal, played by Sean Bean, who has decided to steal the Declaration, and Gates decides to steal it before his nemesis gets to it first. From there, it’s all deciphering codes and clues and reading maps and travelling from city to city, historic site to historic site, all on an adventure to secure the greatest treasure ever known to man.
Like I said, ridiculous. We’re also not talking about high-tier Hollywood filmmaking here. Unlike Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, released a year earlier, and directed by a real artist—Gore Verbinski, my hero—National Treasure is helmed by a true journeyman (perhaps hack). Jon Turteltaub is not much of a household name, probably because the other movies he’s best known for are 3 Ninjas, While You Were Sleeping, and Cool Runnings. Nothing about National Treasure suggests anything behind the wheel other than a sure hand, and its nine-odd screenwriters don’t indicate much in the way of authorial personality in the writing either. To the degree the movie has any distinctive voice, it’s as a Jerry Bruckheimer production. There’s the characteristic Hollywood slickness, the always charging momentum, the overall competency of craft. Caleb Deschanel as DP shoots it well, and Trevor Rabin delivers a solid, Zimmer-ish score.
Where National Treasure really stands out as a Jerry Bruckheimer production is in its attention to narrative and character. It’s not that Ben Gates, or his sidekicks Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) and Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), or any of the other characters are indelible contributions to cinema storytelling, but they’re strong and legible characters. It helps to have the supporting cast populated by actors like Bean, Christopher Plummer, Jon Voight, and Harvey Keitel. Each actor brings personality to their role, and delivers dialogue that feels written with actual attention to what those people might believably say (in that Hollywood way), rather than the interchangeability of characters we tend to get in the post-Marvel era blockbuster where everyone is just a quip machine or some maudlin schmuck dealing with trauma. The same goes for the plotting, which is more than just tight. Bruckheimer at his peak had a gift for getting his films to feel like a perpetual flow without ever being exhausting. Hiring nine screenwriters to polish up the script may seem like overkill, or like making a movie by committee, but in the case of something like National Treasure it actually results in remarkable cohesiveness of narrative form.
Something that has been bugging me to no end in many blockbusters over the last few years is how much they feel assembled in chunks. It’s a problem that afflicts Marvel movies in particular, and the first time I really identified it was in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Almost every scene in that film feels like its own, contained little segment that can be removed or altered at will without fucking up the fundamental structure of any other scene. During one sequence. Shuri makes her big entrance as the new Black Panther in M’Baku’s fortress. She shows her strength, and is then accepted by M’Baku and the rest. Next, she addresses the council about the threat they are facing, and then she asks them all to leave so she can talk to M’Baku alone, in order to convince him to help. It’s not a terribly long sequence. Four minutes or so, but it feels endless. Why? Because it’s actually three discreet chunks, all of which could have been woven more neatly into one, shorter, more effective scene. Or better yet, the movie could have layered all sorts of setups throughout that could have paid off in that one scene, making it feel tighter and more directly a product of everything you’ve watched to that point. Instead, it’s all just an assemblage of puzzle pieces for the artless Kevin Feige to play around with in post.
National Treasure is all setups and payoff. Even small things, like when Ben and Riley walking into Abigail’s office and the camera lingers on a brochure for a reception at the National Archives, which then becomes cover the duo use to pull off their heist. Even when new codes to decipher are introduced, they are a direct function of the clues they uncovered before, so it all feels like one long chase. The film scholar David Bordwell, a fellow National Treasure admirer, once used the film as the basis for an article on a specific kind of edit, which he called The Hook. In an article, Bordwell explained it as an edit that uses the end of one shot or moment, to directly connect to the next in a manner which pulls the audience right through. There are many different kinds. For example, the matching action cut, as seen when a young Ben Gates in the film’s prologue is “knighted” by his grandfather, raising his head, which then cuts to the grown-up Gates. A Hook can also be created through dialogue. In one scene, Ben mentions clues he needs from “those letters,” and when Abigail asks, “What letters?” we get a cut to a completely different shot in a different location, and we hear Abigail exclaim, “You have the original Silence Dogood letters?” These kinds of cuts, which pepper the film, are typical of a style of Hollywood filmmaking, but are particularly emblematic of Bruckheimer’s productions, which prize pure, adrenaline-filled entertainment above all.
God, is National Treasure ever entertaining, though I have to admit, I enjoy it for its history nonsense as well. While the existence of such a treasure is made up, and plenty of facts are twisted for the sake of the adventure, the film features what feels like an endless supply of American history trivia. That is catnip for this America-obsessed Canadian. In fact, when I visited Philadelphia several years back and toured all those famous historic sites, I was most excited to see sites like the current home of the Liberty Bell and its old home at Independence Hall, all because they were featured in National Treasure.
The film came out a year after Dan Brown published The Da Vinci Code, which had become a huge phenomenon. While the timing is too close to know whether one influenced the other, I can tell you that beyond superficial connections like the Knights Templar, the two works felt alike in their page-turner, conspiracy-soaked, treasure hunting adventure. When The Da Vinci Code was finally adapted into a movie a couple years later, it didn’t turn out all that great. That might have been expected, because in truth the book was also pretty shit, but particularly in light of National Treasure, it just felt off. That’s because Brown’s book, and the movie, treat the conspiracy at its core as something serious, like it somehow exposes the lies at the heart of the Catholic Church, and that somber attitude infects everything, making the movie kind of a drag when it should be propulsive. National Treasure, meanwhile, has no such aspirations to expose, other than maybe to get people (and particularly kids, I would guess) into learning about American history. An alternate ending featured on the DVD has a group of school kids looking at the Declaration, safely back in its own at the Archives, wondering if the story about a treasure map on the back was true. “It’s a plot to make us learn history,” one of the kids says. Of course, that kid was right. How else would I know that after it cracked upon first sounding, the Liberty Bell was recast by John Pass and John Stow?
Even before rewatching it, I knew that National Treasure would be entering the canon. It is, to my mind, a perfect movie, and great in its way, but never stretches beyond itself. It does what it sets out to do with aplomb. It does so with all the artful artlessness that the phrase “a Bruckheimer production for Disney” would suggest, rather than, say, a Michael Bay picture, which only a mind like Michael Bay’s could deliver, even with Bruckheimer in the background. National Treasure is hack studio filmmaking at its best—if not necessarily its finest—sort of the best case scenario of producer-driven adventure filmmaking. That’s Five-Star Three-Star Cinema.
The Five-Star Three Star Cinema Club Canon (so far):
National Treasure (2004)
Didn’t quite make the cut: