“National Treasure: Book of Secrets” opens with a murder, a cipher and a lie that sticks to a dead man. Six days after the Civil War ends, John Wilkes Booth and Michael O’Laughlen bring a Playfair cipher to cryptographer Thomas Gates. Thomas cracks it, sees a map to the lost city of Cíbola, and realizes Booth and O’Laughlen belong to the Confederacy-supporting KGC. He tears the pages out to burn them. O’Laughlen shoots him and flees with one surviving fragment. Dying, Thomas tells his son a riddle: “the debt that all men pay.”
Trailer, via BookOfSecrets.
Thomas Gates and the Fragment
Jon Turteltaub directs, Jerry Bruckheimer produces, and the second National Treasure film premiered in New York City on December 13, 2007, before Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures released it in North America on December 21.
In the present, Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) tells that story at a Civilian Heroes conference. Black market dealer Mitch Wilkinson (Ed Harris) interrupts with the lost page, Thomas’s name sitting beside Mary Surratt’s and Samuel Mudd’s. The public decides Thomas masterminded the Lincoln murder. Ben and his father Patrick (Jon Voight) set out to disprove it.
Breaking Into Abigail’s House
Ben recruits Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) to break into his old house, now the home of Dr. Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), Director of Document Conservation and Ben’s estranged ex. She comes back from a date with Connor (Ty Burrell), a White House curator, and finds them.
Spectral imaging shows traces of the Playfair cipher. Ben remembers the riddle, uses its answer, “DEATH,” as the keyword, and the page points to Edouard Rene de Laboulaye and the smaller Statue of Liberty in Paris.
Helen Mirren and Ed Harris
Helen Mirren plays Dr. Emily Appleton-Gates, a professor of Native American studies and Ben’s mother, divorced from Patrick. Harvey Keitel returns as FBI Special Agent Peter Sadusky. Bruce Greenwood plays the President.
Harris is the best thing here. Mitch wants the treasure and wants credit, and Harris plays the want without winking. Mirren gets the few laughs that land.
The Riddle and the Cipher
The mechanics still work. A riddle, a keyword, a clue buried in a diary — the film trusts the audience to follow the chain, and the chain is legible.
What the film never does is raise the stakes. The question of whether Thomas Gates helped kill Abraham Lincoln is treated as a scheduling problem.
What the Sequel Adds
Ranked against the 2004 original, the additions run:
- Helen Mirren as Emily Appleton-Gates, the one new piece with real comic timing.
- Ed Harris as Mitch Wilkinson, a villain with a motive rather than a sneer.
- The Paris Statue of Liberty clue, the film’s best single image.
- Cíbola, a destination the film reaches and then does not know what to do with.
That is a thin return on a sequel.
A Franchise Running on Habit
The 2004 film had novelty. This one has a formula, and it follows the formula without adding pressure. The set pieces are competent, the cast is overqualified, and the whole thing moves like a contract being fulfilled.
The Score on Book of Secrets
The published critical score is 4.8/10, with a Metacritic score of 48/100. That is not a disaster. It is the sound of a franchise coasting.
Cage is fine. He was fine the first time. The problem is that everyone involved has done this before, and the film knows it. A third film is in development, and on this evidence the series needs a reason to exist beyond the fact that the first one made money.
The cipher is not the problem. The problem is that nobody in National Treasure: Book of Secrets seems worried about anything, including the murder of a president.
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