Directed by: Jon Turteltaub
Genres: Adventure, Action
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Diane Kruger, Justin Bartha, Sean Bean, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Plummer, David Dayan Fisher, Stewart Finlay-McLennan, Oleg Taktarov, Stephen A. Pope, Annie Parisse, Mark Pellegrino, Armando Riesco, Erik King
IMDB raintg: 6.6
My rating: 6.5 [rate 6.5]
The film turned out pretty good. It was practically as good as I expected. I just didn’t expect a lot from it. Still, it is a good treasure hunting kind of film. There were three things that I didn’t like.
- Propaganda. Lots of it. I appreciated how all the story was built around American history and Declaration of Independence, but the importance and attribution were way overdone in the movie. Actually, I think if the whole deal was taken from a different approach of casuality and routine, it would have benefited the film a lot.
- History lessons. Pretty often I enjoy history highlights myself. Quotations are cool to a certain degree. I can even live with an attempt of raising interest to history in the heads of modern teenagers. But that is a delicate subject and should be taken with care. “National Treasure” overdid it. Sometimes it was really boring listening to all that historical stuff. I know it was important, but I didn’t ask for a history lecture. I asked for an adventure movie. Dig the difference.
- Acting and dialogues. Ok, Nicholas Cage tried his best. Sean Bean was pretty good. When he was there. Justin Bartha made for an excellent support character. But Diane Kruger wasn’t as good as she can be. Also most of the guys in the Bean’s gang weren’t developed properly. And dialogues… some of them sounded like plays I wrote in my 5th grade. C’mon!
Other than that, the film was pretty entertaining and fastly paced. There were enough adventures, dangeons, dangers, maps, hints, quests, myths, stories, and, of course, treasures. It was all I asked for.