Irrelevance Glorified

Today it is time for another installment of the ‘angry-bad‘ tag. Today’s lucky recipient is “National Treasure: Book of Secrets“. Invariably when I rant on things like this, people ask me why I continue to waste my time, why I choose to start watching movies that suck. Well, first of all, I just needed to kill some time while my laundry was going. Secondly, I was watching it off of Netflix streaming, so it’s not like this movie took up a slot in my queue; this movie did not displace the physical representation of a good movie traveling to my apartment. And finally…I liked the first movie. National Treasure was a decent ridiculous movie. There are certain types of movies that I am a sucker for. Heist movies, for example. I just love ‘em. Ocean’s Eleven…and Twelve and Thirteen for that matter. Italian Job. Many Guy Ritchie movies. Another type I love is stupid treasure movies, like, for example, National Treasure. Movies like this tap into a cultural nerve, of sorts. Over much of the world, we’ve traversed over the land, we’ve scanned the ground from the sky, we’ve spread our species out over any piece of arable land. One might think that there is nothing hugely fantastic left to find. There are no Great Pyramids out there that we just haven’t noticed. So it’s very compelling to create a narrative where great treasure has been hidden under our very noses. It’s what made The Da Vinci Code so popular. When done correctly, it can be quite entertaining. So read on, for spoilers, a dissection, a refusal to suspend disbelief….and possibly my longest post ever.

Unlike my past angry-bad, this one won’t be a complete synopsis. It will only seem like one. I started doing that, and 3000 words later, I realized it was ridiculous. So I will just hit the highlights, and only make this stupidly long.

This movie features the enforced duality problem. I probably just made up that term, and there’s probably a fancier philosophy term for it, but basically it means that there are two competing portrayals of history, and we are supposed to believe that if one is proven to be true, it disproves the other, and vice versa, when in fact there is a wonderful spectrum of possibilities in between. Ben Gates, the Nic Cage character, reprises his role as the spunky cryptohistorian. He thinks that his great-great-grandfather was a national hero, who realized that holdovers from the Confederate army (John Wilkes Booth and company, the Knights of the Golden Circle) were using him to decode a cipher that would allow them to obtain a vast treasure (Cibola, the City of Gold). Thomas Gates disposed of the clue, at the cost of his life. His son was in the room, and passed along the story as family lore. But now someone has come forward with a page of Booth’s diary claiming that Gates was a co-conspirator in Lincoln’s assassination. Gates must find the treasure to prove his ancestor was right….although really, it would prove nothing except that the treasure exists. It in no way exonerates Thomas Gates. But whatever, we apparently need a reason to find a vast amount of treasure this time.

The villains in this movie are led by Mitch Wilkinson, a “Black Market Dealer”. He’s the guy who had the page from Booth’s diary, and as we find out, is descended from a senior member of the Confederate army. So we know he’s evil. He tries to intercept Gates in London after he picks up a hidden, ancient artifact squirreled away in Buckingham Palace, and a chase scene ensues. With guns. In London.

One reason that martial arts films work better in Hong Kong and China than in the States is that handguns are outlawed there. You can have one guy beat up a whole room full of guys, because everyone just has their hands, feet, and maybe some sticks or small blades. If someone tried to go all Jackie Chan in the States, someone will just pull out a 9 mm and put him down from 30 paces. While extended hand-to-hand combat is more realistic in those other countries, the opposite is true of extended gunfights. In the States, if you see someone walking down the street with a holstered gun, there’s a decent chance they might be allowed to carry one. In London, if you see a guy walking around with a gun, if he’s not police he’s probably up to no good. So, it’s completely ridiculous when evil Mitch pulls out a gun and starts shooting indiscriminately. There’s a 10 minute chase scene that goes into crowded pedestrian areas, that involves a truckful of kegs spilling all over the road (after the kegs are shot at), numerous fender benders as they speed through the streets of London….and never once do we hear the sounds of the police. In fact, the legal repercussions of this scene are completely glossed over in this movie. All parties involved appeared to evade the authorities with no consequences. Considering the 500,000+ CCTV cameras in London (and the fact that helicopters exist), the fact that no one was apprehended after this chase is amazing, considering how reckless the villain is about his….villainy.

So what does Ben Gates do when he realizes that Mitch will eventually kill innocent people if this goes on? He gives up the artifact. But before he gives it up, he needs to take a picture of it, for future analysis so he can stay a step ahead of the game. But he has no camera, and no cell phone (camera), and neither does anyone else. What to do, traveling in London? As soon as he started lamenting his lack of camera, I started thinking “Oh, no he wouldn’t…” But he did. Ben Gates runs a red light, prominently, while holding the artifact up, to get the red light camera to take a picture of him. And then gets his assistant Riley to hack into Scotland Yard to get the picture for him. I believe it took about 12 key strokes. The picture had good enough resolution to make out all the glyphs on the artifact. So, now that he has that out of the way, he lets the bad guys drive up so he can open up his window, pass over the artifact, and end the almost-carnage. But just before the hand-off occurs, Yoinks! — Ben flips it into the Thames. Of course, it’s a wooden artifact, and thus floats. The bad guys stop (in the middle of the bridge), and one guy jumps in to retrieve it, giving Gates & co. enough time to book it. That just seemed like poor thinking. Of all the things you could do to that wooden artifact, throwing it in water seems like one of the least damaging. I probably would have gone with fire.

Of course, the artifact they found tells only half the story. The other half is in the Oval Office, in the President’s desk. That part’s easy, though. Through some shenanigans, they are able to sneak into the White House and open up the secret compartment on the President’s Resolute Desk…but the glyph is missing! The only thing that was there was a mysterious stamp….a stamp that represents the Book of Secrets!

The eponymous Book of Secrets is yet another ludicrous plot device in this this movie. The idea is that each President has a book which contains all the crazy secrets of the country, and that this Book gets secretly passed down from President to President, who has a hiding place of his choosing. Only Presidents have seen the inside of this book, which has stuff on Area 51, Bigfoot, etc. Ben Gates needs to talk to the President and get a hold of this Book. But the President would never admit to its existence in the presence of anyone else, and it would be impossible, under normal circumstances, to get an audience with the President with literally no one else around. So, there is only one option.

He has to kidnap the president.

Step 1 of kidnapping the president: choose the battlefield. The President has a birthday party coming up. So, they start a rumor that the building they were going to hold the party in used to hold KKK rallies, or something to that effect. True or not, the party planning committee had to change its plans. Preemptively, Gates & co. go out and book all the backup locations, except for Mount Vernon. Apparently, the type of places that are fancy enough to hold the President’s B-day party are the type of places that will take reservations over the phone, without deposits or documentation, and will hold those reservations even when the White House comes calling 30 minutes later. Mount Vernon it is.

Step 2 : Crash the party. Gates scubas onto the banks of the estate, ditching the wetsuit for a tuxedo and a bottle of champagne. He fools the Secret Service into thinking he’s just a drunken partygoer who had been getting frisky in the bushes. Because, I mean, he’s wearing a tuxedo. Why would he be wearing a tuxdeo if he wasn’t an invited guest?

Step 3 : Engage the interest of the President. Gates strolls right up the president and unfurls an old blueprint of Mount Vernon. Knowing that the President is a history buff, he entices him with the knowledge that there appears to be a previously undiscovered passageway on the premises.

Step 4 : Seal the deal. Gates and the President find the entrance to the secret passage, turn a few ancient (but operable) dials, and open up a passageway. Once through, Gates closes the way behind him, cutting off the Secret Service. With the Secret Service trying to knock down walls to get into the passage, Ben finally has some alone time with the President. They have a stirring discussion, by the end of which Gates convinces the President to give up the location of the Book — the Library of Congress! Hidden, of course. For his cooperation, the President is shown the exit to the passageway (so he can hitch a ride from a trucker), and Ben Gates can head to the LoC. Since the Book is secret, of course, the President can’t say that’s why Ben Gates kidnapped him. You’d think he could come up with something, though. But he doesn’t. For the rest of the movie the Feds are trying to arrest Gates for kidnapping the President. Just like in London, though, it’s really hard for the police to actually nab him. He manages to get to the Library of Congress without them finding him, and manages to get out of there even when they have the place surrounded with hundreds of agents. Apparently, their jurisdiction doesn’t not extend beyond the Library’s parking lot, because once they were through the parking barriers, they couldn’t be found.

While he was in the Library, he does find the Book of Secrets. The artifact had been destroyed, but they took a picture of it. The accompanying records showed that Calvin Coolidge had found the glyph, and deciphered it, discovering that this treasure was in the Black Hills, in South Dakota. So what’s a President to do, in the 1920′s, when faced with the prospect of a tremendous amount of Native American gold? Hide its existence, of course. Destroy the incriminating artifact, and deface the land so that the physical landmarks described in the clues no longer exist. What ‘defacement’ am I talking about, you might ask? Mount Rushmore. Yes, the national monument where the visages of America’s greatest Presidents are engraved is actually a cover for hiding the location of a long lost Native American treasure. What an expensive cover. It’s never clear why Coolidge didn’t take the gold or hide it somewhere else. I mean, it probably wouldn’t even have made the Top 10 list of bad things that white people have done to Native Americans. The Book of Secrets also reveals that the Queen of England had given clues to the Confederacy, in the hopes they would find the gold, use it to remain independent, and weaken the United States in the future.

But whatever. Ben Gates and Mitch find themselves at Mount Rushmore, working together under coercion (Mitch is holding Ben’s Mom hostage). They have to spray water on the right rock to get a symbol of an eagle to appear, and luckily manage to find the right rock within five minutes and everyone’s first water bottle. From then on, they find the secret entrance to an underground chamber. It’s not quite clear if the American government moved the treasure here, or if they just made a new opening to the chamber. There are a number of giant gears, pendulums, and traps that help keep this place secure, oddly enough out of place for both ancient Native Americans and early 20th century Americans.

It is as we are fumbling towards the climax that we finally learn what Mitch Wilkinson’s motivation for this entire drama is — he wants the Wilkinson name to be known for something awesome like finding a treasure, not something lame like being in the Confederacy. Mitch doesn’t even want the treasure for himself; he knows that it will turn into — ahem — a National Treasure, not melted down into his own treasury. So, Mitch’s motivation for threatening dozens of bystander lives in London, for assaulting both of Ben Gates’ parents, for lying and stealing and hurting all throughout this movie, is that he wants to redeem the Wilkinson name. Right.

By turning some ancient wheels in this ancient underground cavern (underground, and next to a lake, but not completely underwater), they open up some ancient tubes and drain the water away from the entrance to the main vault of the cavern, where they behold a veritable pyramid made of gold, 100 feet tall. To please all the anthropologists in the audience, it also holds the rosetta stone for translating ancient Native American languages. But the danger is not over yet! The machinery that diverted the water away from this vault begins to break down, and the vault begins to flood again. They need to get out of here! Water is rushing, gushing everywhere. Where is it all going?! Apparently not being able to follow the motion of rapidly flowing water, Ben Gate’s father (played by Jon Voigt) drops a dollar bill into the water so they can follow it. They all dive in, and appeared headed to the exit — until they come up against a wall that blocks their path. A giant crank in the room can raise the sluice-gate….but someone needs to stay behind to keep it open while everyone leaves. Mitch helps Ben open the door so everyone can escape, but only with the agreement that Ben will stay behind to let Mitch through, trapping Ben behind forever. But before Mitch can consummate his evil deed, the room starts to collapse, trapping Mitch under a rock. With his last ounce of strength, he holds the door open so everyone can leave, imploring Ben to honor his memory by giving him credit for finding the treasure.

So everyone but the bad guy lives, and they escape the caverns without dying of hypothermia. Once outside, they call the authorities so the treasure can be looted properly by scientists. They are granted a special visit by the President, who takes this moment to tell the Secret Service that Ben Gates didn’t kidnap him and that it was all some sort of misunderstanding. I think this means that if Gates didn’t find the treasure, he would have been arrested for kidnapping the President.

So that’s pretty much it. Bad guy dies, Ben Gates finds yet another treasure, and Gates’ ancestor told the truth when he said that there was an ancient treasure map that led to the City of Gold, which somehow exonerates him from being a co-conspirator with John Wilkes Booth. I watched it all so you don’t have to.

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