National Treasure
dir. Jon Turteltaub
Touchstone Pictures

Dan Brown is the current record-holder for having written the most bad books among the bestsellers. His parochial pulp hits "Angels & Demons" and "The DaVinci Code," like his two false starts "Deception Point" and "Digital Fortress," established a staccato, airport-ready style where chapters last no longer than two pages and, typically, 90 seconds of action. The resultant bodies of work are shallow and devoid of context, but they're blessings for short attention spans and plot-driven readers. In short, they're books written like movies. Take "The DaVinci Code," whose premise is the idea that the holy grail is a person and that Leonardo DaVinci knew it. Brown does wonderful work mining the masterpieces for visual cues flexible enough to fit his conspiracy theory, but is there even a book aside from this basic idea? In each of his works, Brown sacrifices character development for sprinting speed. The casts of his two hits — intellectual leading man Robert Langdon and a revolving coterie of crafty and wise can-do females, venerated elders and deformed and unaccompanied enemy agents — breathlessly run from one locale to another in a losing race against time.

These aren't books praised for their form, but for their content: the resurgence of the Illuminati in "Angels & Demons" and then "DaVinci's" fully realized grail quest. The next logical step is toward the Freemasons, and so here comes National Treasure, in which Nicolas Cage plays Langdon, searching for the treasure of the Knights Templar (erstwhile guardians of the grail) that prominent early American Freemasons (a society that spawned the Illuminati) hid from the British through a necessarily elaborate series of clues. All told, the movie's not too bad. So now Dan Brown has conquered the world, right?

Negative. Brown isn't affiliated whatsoever with National Treasure. Cage's character isn't Langdon but Benjamin Franklin Gates, an adventurer dedicated to deciphering the Templar clue entrusted to his recursively-great grandfather. In other words, producer Jerry Bruckheimer has hijacked Brown's franchise from beneath him, although roughly concurrent development timelines suggest that it wasn't exactly piracy. Brown has spoken of following "DaVinci" with a book about the Masons among our founding fathers, and if his books were any deeper than connect-the-dot trivia quests, he might stand a chance. But National Treasure already has given us an adventure predicated on such clues as symbols on currency, unnoticed notes carved into national monuments and 200-year-old tools. Brown has room to interpret these to suit his adventure, but in his characters' search for the truth, Langdon is bound at some point to remove a bill from his wallet — as Ben does in a Philadelphia-area Urban Outfitters — and in stunned reverence realize something akin to "it's been in front of our eyes all along!" Unfortunately for Brown, there's perilously little wiggle room in watershed moments like this.

Ironically, Brown's stolen-from-blockbusters structure has come back to bite him because he doesn't have the chops to do better than actual blockbuster screenwriters. Cormac Wibberley and Marianne Wibberley (The Sixth Day) and uncredited rewriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio (Pirates of the Caribbean) have outdone themselves — big-screen treasure hunts are only as strong as their clues are interesting, and because the National Treasure team won the race to this story space, they unleash some doozies that'll have children and parents alike re-examining their American history textbooks with fervor. (Spelling them out here would be remarkably unsporting.)

Christopher Plummer (playing Ben's grandfather John Adams Gates) kicks off the proceedings with a short and selective history lesson on the Masons. He trots out the basic sworn and loyal brotherhood incidentals and, like the balance of the film, sidesteps the messy Illuminati story; after all, National Treasure was tame enough to fly under the Walt Disney banner. Dodging explicit citation of the Illuminati scores two points: It maintains a "family friendly" status for the film and avoids exhuming factoids already popularized by Brown's novels. (The anti-Catholic charges of undermining the church are given less explicit air later in the story when, lo, our explorers discover a Mason mine under Trinity Church on Wall Street.)

Unlike Brown's characters, known for galumphing around European capitols, Cage's team is on a far more appreciable quest of rooting though Washington, Philadelphia and New York. Treasure's game of symbology is much more invigorating than Brown's because these destinations are so familiar to viewers, unlike octagonal Roman towers or Parisian crypts. When Cage sits on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, viewers will click with National Treasure because it's their Lincoln Memorial, too. When Cage uses the Declaration of Independence as a shield against the attack of British gunmen, it invites an ironic chuckle, but it's a moment where the viewer understands the allusion and locks in even further. Ben's father (Jon Voight as Patrick Henry Gates, I kid you not) constantly evangelizes common sense — in his opinion, early Americans drafted these intricate clues to distract the British with a hunt for fake treasure — and Ben validates him when he repeatedly shakes his British expatriate (Sean Bean) off the Templar trail with red herrings and misdirection. Setting up a narrative contraption like this isn't difficult, but it's thoughtful, and it's reflective of the care the storytellers have taken with National Treasure.

John Turteltaub isn't the type of director Bruckheimer usually taps, but he's the type he needs to make a data-heavy movie like Treasure succeed. Turteltaub's cred comes mostly from such family fare as Phenomenon and While You Were Sleeping, movies where plot points are trotted out loud and clear. He's equally forward with Treasure's design, and he isn't afraid to break a scene down into a few lines of info-swap — moments that Bruckheimer mainstays Tony Scott and Michael Bay would bend over backwards to sex up or speed up. Those directors don't understand that viewers will acquit Turteltaub these dramatic pauses because, well, they want the information, too. National Treasure is a thriller that both begs you to think along with the characters and gives you the time to do so. Dan Brown writes like Bay directs: 10-second scenes as mini-chapters that cram a clue down your throat and end mid-page. If Brown's novels were as cooperative with readers as Turteltaub's movie is with viewers, he'd be able to craft a unique, satisfying Masonic quest in spite of National Treasure. Until he figures that out, he's clueless.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)