There are a lot of stupid things in this world. Roughly fifty-five percent of them are the Nicolas Cage, Goonies-meets-a- 3rd-grade-American-history- textbook-but-on-fire movie National Treasure. That percentage may seem a little inflated, but not if you've seen the movie.
Just how stupid was National Treasure? Well, at one point near the end of the movie, I thought the treasure Nicolas Cage and friends were searching for the entire film might end up being a "treasure," like freedom, or true love, or the pursuit of happiness. That would have been pretty stupid, but not as perfectly stupid as the actual ending: Nicolas Cage and friends finding a comically large vault underneath New York City filled with more chests of gold, and diamonds, and rubies than 1 million Scrooge McDuck cartoons. There were also several giant gold sarcophagi sitting right next to subway tunnels for over 100 years, and probably a couple diamond-encrusted Ferraris buried in there somewhere, next to the gilded pyramid full of tiaras.
The sequel, National Treasure 2: Treasurier is going to be in theaters soon, but since the creators seem to have blown their treasure load in the first movie, what could the treasure possibly be this time? A secret book filled with our nation's secretiest secrets? (Hint: it's a secret book filled with our nation's secretiest secrets.)
While a book that proves all conspiracy theories are justified is cool, it hardly lives up to the definition of treasure established in the first movie–unless, of course, the book is part of a secret library of volumes that have been dipped in platinum, embellished with ivory from Ben Franklin's teeth, and engraved using tools fashioned from Thomas Jefferson's bones.
At this rate, the next National Treasure movie will be National Treasure 3: Tony Bennett.