Movie Review - National Treasure

National Treasure (2004)

Oooooh - Masons! My grandfather's grandfather, the footman to someone who signed the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (pendence-dence-dence-dence), heard of Masons! And thus begins our adventure with Nick Cage's character Ben Franklin Gates. Little Ben's demented Grandad bestow's Templar-hood on him in his dad's attic one dreary night, but having just seen Kingdom of Heaven, I don't think he did it right, because Grandad forgot to slap the fire out of Ben.

Oh, well. Ben grows up anyway, and the next thing we know, he's in the Arctic Circle carrying a magic pickaxe which locates wooden nameplates on old ships buried in ice after only three swift chops. Whack! Whack! Rosebud!

What you do after that, if you are a REAL historian, is sit your bum down on an ice cube and free associate your way to the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (pendence-dence-dence-dence) . See if you can do it:

blood, meerschaum, iron, pen, resolve, weewee, peepee, cow tipping, sherpa's hernia truss

Of course these can point to only one thing - There's an invisible treasure map on the back of the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (pendence-dence-dence-dence) . . . and someone's going to steal it!

Granted, I'm not a government major or anything, but isn't there, like, more than one copy of the DoI? So how did the sherpa's truss tell them which one they wanted? Tell you what - We're not to worry our pretty heads about that! Instead let me tell you how to break into the National Archives.

First, go into a D.C. subway and drill a hole in a pipe. Stick a wire into the hole, and then take a picture of a guard's badge. Pshop your own image onto the badge. (No! Don't concern yourself with resolution or dpi's or any of that stuff!) Then you're set to go. Oh, wait - you also have to accidently kidnap an archivist who has been trained in the science of dousing irreplaceable documents with lemon juice. (This might be the tricky part.) Now you can go.

Have to say - I really loved this movie. It was great, stupid fun in the same way ConAir or Honeymoon in Vegas are perfect lazy Sunday afternoon vid feeds. It just got dumber and more unlikely by the minute, until they end up in a Benjamin Franklin and the Temple of Doom scenario that made me laugh out loud. TBF goodness, allll the way!