The follow up to the hit Disney film may not have been originally planned, but was nonetheless enjoyable. Released in 2007 National Treasure 2 focuses on another war with secrets, legends and once again an impossible crime has to be pulled off. Spoilers ahead as usual. I DO NOT OWN THE PICTURE.
A couple of years after the first film Ben Gates (Nicholas Cage) is living with his dad Patrick (Jon Voight) after he and Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger) broke up while Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) is a not exactly successful author. Ben and Patrick are at a Civilian Heroes conference accepting for Ben’s great great grandfather Thomas Gates who died the same day as President Lincoln destroying parts of John Wilkes Booth’s diary and perhaps preventing Booth and his conspirators from the Knights of the Golden Circle from decoding a message hidden within the pages. However Mitch Wilkinson (Ed Harris), a black market antiquities dealer, provides what seems to be one of the missing pages from Booth’s diary with Thomas’s name on it claiming Thomas was not only one of the conspirators but was the mastermind behind Lincoln’s assassination. Ben, along with Patrick, Abigail, Riley, FBI agent Sadusky (Harvey Keitel) and Ben’s mother, Patrick’s ex-wife Emily (Helen Mirren) set out to prove this is not true. Traveling all over the world and discovering clues Ben and the team discover that the message hidden in Booth’s diary may be leading to Cibola, the legendary city of gold, and the key to finding it may be hidden in another legend: the President’s Secret Book which supposedly also contains many other conspiracies that may or may not be true. Ben decides in order to get to the treasure and to prove his ancestors’ innocence before Mitch can further drag his family’s name down he has to do another impossible task: kidnap the President (Bruce Greenwood). About as far as I should go without giving away the rest of the movie.
Now what I said a while back about sequels still stands (nine out of ten are not great), and this sort of proves it. National Treasure 2 for me was not as good as the first one for a majority of the film (Cage in particular if I have to be picky), but I still enjoyed the movie. With so many legends out there it probably wasn’t easy to come up with the right one, but I think the President’s Secret Book is one that may not be as well-known so whether or not it was the right call is debatable. The writing and acting could have been better in a few places, I think they were taking a more comedic routine in this one so that is a fault, but I do like how international the movie went. My last nit-pick is the conclusion. Obviously they were leaning towards making a third film, but it has been so long I somewhat doubt it will happen. I read somewhere that a script was finished, but Disney did not like it. I think if they were to do a sequel it is too little too late, unless it is a REALLY good script. Otherwise do not bother. As for this film if you liked the first National Treasure than by all means watch it, otherwise this probably should not be on your radar.
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