National Treasure: Book Of Secrets

I had a rip-roaring adventure-fueled evening last night with Nicholas Cage, Helen Mirren and John Voight in 'National Treasure: The Book Of Secrets'. The Book is, of course, so top secret only one person every few years even sees it as it's passed personally from one President to another. Anyway.

It's one adventure sequence followed by another, a modern day Indiana Jones, with set pieces and jokes hitting hard and fast, paying scant attention to history or fact - apparently Queen Victoria supported the confederates in the US Civil War. Gosh. And at one point in the film it talked about a Spanish seaman being shipwrecked in Florida and being taken to a golden city in Dakota to recover - have the writers ever seen a map of America? And the golden city is full of Inca and Aztec type of images built under Mount Rushmore, a couple of thousand miles north of the most northerly point where they ever lived. Um. OK.

So, leaving aside the ever so slight historic and geographic inaccuracies, it was good fun. Whizzing from New York to Paris to London to Washington to goodness knows where else, shoot-em-up car chases in the London streets (did you know there's a Georgian mews right in front of Buckingham Palace? Obviously they've built over the Mall and Green Park without me noticing), conspiracy theories and plot twists galore and the mandatory comic character and love story.

Nicholas Cage was fine running round and being out-of-breath but every now and then looked a bit gaunt to me. John Voight played his old man role quite nicely but why was he stooped and a bit feeble - age doesn't have to be played as that stereotype at all and certainly not the way Helen Mirren played it. Helen did her sexy older woman thing as Nicholas Cage's mother and John Voight's ex-wife who he hasn't seen in 32 years (eh?) as a feisty, aggressive college professor who is one of the few people who can read the lost native language on a plank of wood. Um, was that a metaphor for something? She had nice tangled hair and clambered round on rocks very well indeed.

It was good mindless fun in lots of respects but I have a slight niggling worry that some people might have left the cinema last night thinking that Custer really was killed for trying to find the lost city of gold and not as part of a war with native Americans, that Britain supported the slave trade in America despite having abolished slavery decades earlier and that the real reason for France giving the Statue of Liberty to America was to hide a clue to a secret treasure map in Liberty's torch. Or maybe that's all true and I've believed the wrong conspiracy theory all these years...?