In the first seven or eight days of its big screen life, National Treasure received an especially severe hiding from the mass media reviewers. I could see what they meant. It is a relatively thin film with bogusly linked elements of American history posing as a quest-inspired narrative. It feels by-the-numbers in its succession of Indiana Jones-like events, and offers suspense scenes that are not quite nail-bitingly engaging.

Yet an aspiring screenwriter might want to transcribe this movie or hunt down its script, as it seems to offer a template of what Hollywood (and Jerry Bruckheimer-style producers in particular) are offering the public and therefore want to buy from scribes. Cancel those subscriptions to Creative Screenwriting: here’s an easy-to-use template for Hollywood success.

One thing I didn’t realize walking into the theater was that National Treasure was not just a Disney release, but specifically a Disney movie. The first reel was pre-loaded with trailers for all manner of now-forgotten kid movies and comedies, such as Guess Who, Electra, and Son of the Mask, making me wonder if all of moviedom had become infantilized. Are the same people who would come to see these comedies the same target market as those who would attend National Treasure?

But in the wake of its re-release on DVD in a new dual disc set (the first one came out in May 2005), I come to offer meager praise for National Treasure, not throw more dirt on its funeral bier. While not exactly enjoying National Treasure as fully as it wants to be enjoyed, I did find a few of what Truffaut called “privileged moments.”

For one thing, there were three clever moments in the film, and in a script credited to writers Jim Kouf, Cormac Wibberley, and Marianne Wibberley. At one point Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) comes up with the password to the room holding the Declaration of Independence, which he wants to steal, unscrambling a bunch of letters he knows that Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), an archivist, typed on a key pad — folarvyge. Cage beats the computer decrypting software by realizing that Abigail typed the letters “l” and “e” twice: thus the pass code is Valley Forge.

In another moment, as Gates and Chase realize that there really is a map on the back of the Declaration, and that lemon juice and direct heat will reveal it, they look at each other and say, in order, “More heat.” “More juice.” I thought it was kind of clever, but it is a dangerous bit of dialogue, easily flung back at the film by reviewers thinking that National Treasure lacks both those elements.

And later Cage makes a good joke when the FBI suggests he act as bait: ” You know, Agent Sadusky, something I noticed about fishing? It never worked out so well for the bait.” Well, it works in the movie.

Small moments, surely, and probably not described here adequately enough to portray how pleasing they felt in the theater. On a larger scale, there is an interesting sub-theme in the film about style. Gates, when he decides to steal the Declaration to protect it from a more ruthless opponent (Sean Bean as Ian Howe, a very agreeable, pleasing, even human villain), he engages a delicate, complex succession of sly intrusions, while Howe, coincidentally going in at the same time, basically just beats down the doors. It’s the style of Mission Impossible, almost too elegant for its own sake, versus The Dirty Dozen, so to speak. There is not much point to this contrast thematically, but it was a more substantial referentiality than some of the other filmic references National Treasure makes.

Of course the biggest citation is to the Indiana Jones movies, even to the extent of having Jon Voight stand in as a Sean Connery equivalent, and to have in Kruger as bland a heroine as appeared in most of the Jones films (Kruger is so ephemeral it’s as if she doesn’t have any facial features). There is also an equally faceless goofy hipster sidekick named Riley (Justin Bartha), and both pop up again in the forthcoming sequel.

Sadly, it’s when Gates and Co. finally find the treasure they’ve been looking for that the film fails to fulfill expectations. What should be a grand image, like the last shot of the first Jones film, or even Citizen Kane for that matter, here seems dark and purposely obscured, as if to hide a lack of imagination or a depletion of funds. Plus the writers miss numerous chances to make intellectual gags about the kind of stuff that might be part of the treasure. Only Abigail identifies a few rolled up parchments as books from the Library of Alexandria. Much more could have been squeezed out of the setting, and a director like, say, Joe Dante would have done it. Instead, Jon Turtletaub is a metteur en scene, but now on the bombastic level of a Michael Bay, at least as far as this film goes.

The double disc set is now offered up by Disney as a prelude to the sequel, National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Disc number one includes the movie, broken up into 19 chapters, along with a conventional making-of (11 minutes), two deleted scenes (coming to just over 7 minutes), and an alternate ending (1:01) with intros and yak tracks, and “Opening Scene Animatic” (2:21). In my humbled opinion, the quiet, greed-free less feel-good discarded ending is better than the finished film’s. The thing about making-ofs is that they try to sell you on a movie that you already have. I can’t do any more than I have already to make a commitment to owning this film, and yet it’s still selling me. Stop, already. You had me at “Here is your change, sir.”

In addition, apparently if you play a little game and “break a code” you get a couple more featurettes, “The Knights Templar” and “Treasure Hunters Revealed.” My philosophy is, if you want me to watch your goddamn features you’ll put them clearly and easily on the goddamn menu.

Finally, there are trailers for Disney movies in general, the 101 Dalmations DVD, for Blu-Ray discs in general, National Treasure: Book of Secrets (which looks like it draws its inspiration from The Da Vinci Code, just as this one is refried Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible), Disney Movie Rewards, and Underdog, all reaffirming again that National Treasure is viewed as a kids’ film. Aside from differences in the menu and the trailers, plus the addition of French and Spanish language tracks, it is the same disc that came out two years ago.

Disc two has five more deleted scenes, one of which would have made the final underground adventure even longer in the theater. These come with video intros and optional commentaries (7:53). Next there is a 12-minute featurette on codes and ciphers, with talking heads David Kahn and Simon Singh, among others, probably the most interesting feature of the lot. “Exploding Charlotte” (6:34) shows some set tech. “To Steal a National Treasure” (5:46) recounts how the filmmakers came up with the heist. And finally “On the Set of History” (6:08) chronicles the location work. Taken together, this amounts to about 40 new minutes of material. Does material of under an hour now constitute a “collector’s edition”? And what will happen when National Treasure: Ultimate Truths Revealed comes out? Will they add another new 40 minutes to each of the DVDs?

National Treasure hits the street Tuesday, December 18 and retails for $29.95.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.