Big Mac Cinema #2: National Treasure
Big Mac Cinema #2: National Treasure
A few words about "American history"
Welcome to my recurring Big Mac Cinema column, in which I am out in search of that rare delight: the five-star three-star movie. Inspired by my post about 1996’s Twister, and expanded upon in a follow-up post, the idea here is to build out a canon of movies that, like McDonald’s Big Mac, are not exactly great, and certainly not transcendent, but are great at being the exact kind of perfect mediocrity you sometimes crave on a Sunday afternoon. These posts will be for paid subscribers, so chip in and join me on the quest (and feel free to recommend movies I should seek out!)
Check out the inaugural entry, on The Siege, here.
Every time I watch a movie, I think to myself, Is this better than National Treasure? The answer is usually, “No.”
On the hunt for the next possible entry into the Big Mac Cinema canon, I weighed several options spanning several decades. While I’m sure I’ll get to more than a few of them over time (I’m keeping a list), I was reminded this week of a true favourite of mine: National Treasure. I’ve seen it many, many times. Ignoring all the animated Disney movies I wore out on VHS in my childhood, National Treasure has got to be one of my most-watched movies. I still remember being in high school, with a bootleg DVD of the film I got at Pacific Mall, using my lunch breaks over several days to rewatch the film with another friend who loved it on the eMac in the Comm Tech room. I’ve seen it so many times, I can practically recite whole scenes. I love National Treasure.
Much as I love the movie, though, you’d never catch me arguing it’s actually “great,” whatever that means. There’s a reason the movie is referenced more often as a joke than anything else; the scene in which Nicholas Cage says, “I’m gonna steal it. I’m gonna steal the Declaration of Independence,” has become something like a meme over the last two decades. National Treasure is a patently ridiculous movie. The Knights Templar collected a vast treasure of loot from across centuries of global conflict, and eventually, through the Masons, stashed it somewhere in the continental United States. Several of the Founding Fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, were in on it, hiding clues to the location of the treasure, with one family of treasure hunters seeking it out for generations in order to… protect it? Cage is Benjamin Franklin Gates, who refuses to let go of the idea that the treasure is real, wanting to do right by his grandfather. He’s betrayed by a wealth British criminal, played by Sean Bean, who has decided to steal the Declaration, and Gates decides to steal it before his nemesis gets to it first. From there, it’s all deciphering codes and clues and reading maps and travelling from city to city, historic site to historic site, all on an adventure to secure the greatest treasure ever known to man.