National Treasure: Book of Secrets - Review

Nic Cage is back and running another fine-toothed comb through American history. Hey, treasure hunting isn’t just for guys in cool hats anymore. It’s been almost wholly taken over by dudes with overly long, bad hair. Sorry Indy. National Treasure: Book of Secrets is a worthy enough successor to the first National Treasure movie, and continues its tradition of well, just having a helluva lot of fun with American history. Except perhaps it’s just a little less fun this time around; the Gates family saga has gotten more spastic with the wear and tear of use.

As always, it’s about more than simply finding gold for Ben Gates (Nic Cage). In this second film, our heroic history treasure hunter is out primarily to clear his family’s name. Luckily, the route to doing that is paved with bricks of long lost bullion. When a missing page from Lincoln assassinator John Wilkes Booth’s diary is discovered, Ben Gate’s great great grandfather is accused of being the mastermind behind the Lincoln assassination. To prove his ancestor an innocent patriot, Ben sets out to uncover the real meaning of the diary page, which he believes is the first clue in a treasure map. Guess what? It is.

If there’s a problem with Book of Secrets, it’s that the whole thing has gotten too caffeinated. Director John Turtletaub, perhaps in an effort to follow the built in necessity for a sequel to be bigger and flashier than the original, amps the film up further than it ought to go. Clues fly by fast and furiously, sometimes too fast to really get any sort of hold on what’s going on. Following along with Ben Gates as he leaps from one clue to the next becomes almost an impossible task by the movie’s end, and at some point you’re forced to simply throw up your hands and let whatever happens happen. That’s alright, I was content to sit back and watch all the national monuments on display fly by. You can’t go wrong setting your movie’s finale on Mt. Rushmore.

So maybe the mystery’s not quite as easy to follow, but the character’s still work and the idea of tracking down the true story of historical figures for profit is still a blast. Nic Cage continues to use the uber-nerd persona he’s built up over the years effectively as Gates. Somehow watching him rattle off volumes and volumes of facts is incredibly entertaining. He brings so much enthusiasm to the character, it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the history he’s geeking out over hunting. The movies best moments are still the ones where Cage and his crew are simply talking things out, riffing on what they know and sitting around figuring out where it’s going to take them. All the tunnels and traps are only window dressing, a reason to get us to the next historical geek-out session.

The supporting cast is mostly just there. This is Cage’s movie. Jon Voight is effective as his aged father, and Helen Mirren is a nice addition as his mother. Diane Kruger is back as his girlfriend, though honestly they could have brought in any randomly hot blonde to step into the role and no one would have noticed any difference. Justin Bartha is still the perfect sidekick, witty, weird, and funny in all the wrong moments.

National Treasure 2’s script deserves special credit, for giving us a bad guy who’s more than just some sniveling billionaire out for riches. Ed Harris’ plays Ben Gates’ opposition, but the movie’s strength comes more from pitting Gates against the historical clues he must uncover than in pitting him against any human baddie. So, with Gates true opponent being a bunch of clues, Harris ends up with more complexity than the average bad guy and his character, while ultimately forgettable, at least isn’t predictable.

If you liked National Treasure, you’re going to have fun with Book of Secrets. Maybe not quite as much fun, but it’s still a good movie going bet, especially if you’re looking for something to haul the whole family to in this holiday season. Come on, you can’t take grandma to see Dewey Cox. Granny shouldn’t even be allowed to say his name, let alone watch him next to you in a theater. It’s great escapism, but more than that, it’s escapism with substance. It’s fantasy, but enough of it is grounded in real history that the film’s bound to get you interested in the real deal. I know it did for me. The first thing I did when I got home was to Google John Wilkes Booth’s diary. Yes it exists, and yes there really are 18 pages missing. Want to know what might happen if one of them turned up? Hey there’s this movie called Book of Secrets…

Bratz: The Movie - Review

This is not a review for the 8 to 14 year old girls Lionsgate is hoping will be in the audience for Bratz: The Movie. This is a review for the 30 to 50 year old parents, debating whether or not to let their kids see it or worse, trying to decide whether or not they should accompany them. Don’t. To teenage girls Bratz will probably be the greatest thing they’ve ever seen, but then so would any movie which uses abbreviations like OMG and BFF with spastic frequency. For everyone else, Bratz is like being raped by MySpace.

The movie begins pounding away by taking the term “morning person” to an entirely new, dizzying level. Four perfectly cute girls of perfectly diverse (but not too dark!) ethnicities wake up in their respective bedrooms, leap out of bed, and begin dancing in their PJs. Who needs coffee when you’re young, super cool, and have closets full of expensive clothes! After a quick video conference while they decide on outfits, the girls meet up for their first day of high school looking even more super cool than they did in the last scene! Unfortunately, all is not well at their new high school. The place is run by an uber-nasty mean girl who has divided the cafeteria up into cliques. Unable to escape established school hierarchy the girls are separated. Flash two years later and they are no longer friends, but chance circumstances bring them back together so they can be super cool again and show everyone else how awesome and super cool it is to be like them and wear totally awesome outfits and spend all your time obsessing over fashion and stuff.

Bratz is basically a cross-pollinated knockoff of Mean Girls and Clueless, except without any of the stuff that made those movies good. For starters, it just doesn’t go anywhere. The movie has no real purpose other than to follow four girls around on various shopping excursions and watch them wax poetic about how important your friends are. It’s like pop culture-porn, a script written primarily to shove on screen whatever it is that a bunch of marketing nerds think is hot with teenage girls. Oh the film makes some half-hearted attempt to say something about being yourself, but when it says it, the words come out more like: “If you’re super cool and super good looking then you should totally be yourself because everyone will like you and it will be awesome and oh yeah your friends are so more important than anything in the whole world and don’t forget to buy lots of hot clothes and use You Tube!” As life lessons go, I can’t imagine anything more meaningless.

The script is bad enough all by itself, but they’ve actually managed to cast a group of young actresses who make it even worse. The four leads are played by unknowns, and I submit that they may have been unknown for a reason. Not one of them can act. Their performances are about on par with that of your average 6-year-old kid in a milk commercial, except most of them are nearly 20 and theoretically smart enough to understand that acting is more than just a session of “lets pretend”. Special note must be made of Jon Voight who shows up as the world’s richest high school principle. Teachers may make a lousy salary, but apparently that principle gig buys at least one mansion. Dear Mr. Voight, wearing a prosthetic nose is no substitute for acting. It’s just a fake nose. It doesn’t make your performance better. Stop it.

Bratz is an awful movie, but it’s probably not a harmful one. I mean it’s not going to make your daughters run out and start selling themselves for sex the way buying slutty dolls the movie is based on will. At worst Bratz: The Movie may make your daughters dumber or teach them that if they aren’t super good looking they have no hope of ever being popular. The first will probably happen anyway if they watch MTV, and the second, well it’s probably true. It’s a shallow world we live in and Bratz: The Movie does its best to make it even more shallower than ever! OMG! Will you be my BFFs?

Transformers - Review

Transformers began life as a body-morphing toy before shape-shifting into a TV cartoon series. Now it has evolved once again, this time into a big, dumb, loud action movie, occasionally tasteless, far too long, yet wildly diverting most of the time. There is no denying that director Michael Bay—the man who also brought us Bad Boys, The Rock, Armaggedon, Pearl Harbor, and Bad Boys II—has a talent for brainless, over-the-top, CGI-enhanced theatrics. After misfiring with the comparatively staid The Island, Bay gets back to basics with Transformers, a high-octane symphony of machine battling machine and stuff blowing to pieces.

Transformers is at its very worst in its opening minutes when U.S. soldiers on a base in Qatar find themselves under a sudden and merciless assault. The foe is eventually revealed to be extraterrestrial, part of the murderous Decepticon robot race and the scene is effective, yet it gets the movie off on the wrong foot. At this particular time in American history, does anyone really want to see American soldiers getting blown to smithereens in the Middle East even by CGI robots?

Those early scenes threaten to sink the entire enterprise, yet it only takes the introduction of a single teenager, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) to make things right. Visiting a used car lot with his dad (Kevin Dunn), the high school nerd falls in love with a rusting Camaro. The hunk of junk has a strange quirk: its radio has a habit of turning on spontaneously to tacky old pop songs that oddly befit whatever situation Sam finds himself in. But when Sam thinks that some has stolen the heap and he tracks it to a rail yard, he discovers it has an even more bizarre kink when it transforms into a robot.

Though those soldiers in Qatar and Sam back in the 'burbs don't realize it yet, they are early unwitting recruits into the robot wars between the evil Decepticons and the benevolent Autobots. The Decepticons prefer to transform into helicopters and cop cars and things that are just as ugly, except for a small, hyperactive one that jabbers non-stop and can morph into things like CD players and cell phones. The Autobots, led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), have a much more refined aesthetic, preferring to transmute into items like Sam's bitchin' Camaro. They also have far more expressive personalities.

Motivation also divides the robot races. The Decepticons want to lay waste to the planet in their quest to take over the universe. Optimus Prime, on the other hand, makes pronouncements about how the Autobots, hope to "bring peace to this planet," which just goes to show how little research went into this alien invasion if he thinks merely stopping the Decepticons will bring about that. Of course, the Autobots' idea of promoting peace is to throw down with the Decepticons in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, destroying buildings, cars, and anything else that gets caught in the middle.

It is all amusing in an explosive sort of way, as it follows a formula at least as old as Godzilla and as up-to-date as the Terminator series, even if the eventual climax goes on far too long (like a rambunctious little boy with toy Transformers, Bay is not going to stop playing until he has broken every last one). It is also a little more than that, thanks mainly to LaBeouf's grounded performance. There are a lot of human characters in Transformers, but most of them are one-dimensional stereotypes, grist for the action mill. Only LaBeouf transcends that, suggesting that something really is at stake in this movie, if it is only this one kid's life.

"I bought a car and it turned out to be an alien robot," Sam complains, but that turns out to be not such a bad thing. At least, his car turns out to be entertaining and so is this movie. Just be sure to check your brain at the door; for close to two-and-half-hours, you will not need it.