THE GREATEST ADVENTURE HISTORY HAS EVER REVEALED.

Historian/adventurer Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) has always been looking for history’s greatest treasure; he discovers that the back of the Declaration of Independence may harbor clues to it.

Here’s an action movie that wants to teach us about American history in a clever and entertaining way, throwing us from one landmark to the next. Just don’t believe too much of it. Cage is fun as a new kind of Indiana Jones; his assistants, Diane Kruger and Justin Bartha, are likeable and Sean Bean, as expected, a villain one loves to hate.

The filmmakers pace their adventure well and avoid the worst kind of hysteria that has come to mar this genre.

2004-U.S. 130 min. Color. Widescreen. Directed by Jon Turteltaub. Music: Trevor Rabin. Cast: Nicolas Cage (Ben Gates), Diane Kruger (Abigail Chase), Jon Voight (Patrick Gates), Sean Bean, Christopher Plummer, Harvey Keitel. 

Trivia: Followed by National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007) and a TV series, National Treasure: Edge of History (2022-2023).