FOOL'S GOLD

Reviewed - National Treasure: This dumb, incomprehensible rip-off of The Da Vinci Code does move at a good clip, writes Donald Clarke

While watching Nicolas Cage, hair nearly as thin as his credibility, and Diane Kruger, the debilitating chill at the heart of Troy, solving fantastically obtuse conundrums in this preposterous action-adventure, I felt childhood memories stirring.

There is certainly something of Batman about Cage's po-faced pondering. But, no, that's not it. The solutions bear too remote a relationship to the questions even for the Riddler. What we have here is a 90-squillian-dollar version of the notorious 1980s Ted Rogers game show 321.

Bring together the bassist with Spinal Tap (though just one) and the drummer with ZZ Top and you will find he who covets the millions of the fellow in between green and blue with a similar interest to Nat King Cole. Derek Smalls and Frank Beard give us the phrase Small Beard, which suggests a particular high-concept producer. The novelist Dan Brown is, if we consider the order snooker balls are sunk, in between green and blue and, like Nat King Cole, has focussed some attention on the Mona Lisa.

No Dusty Bin for us. National Treasure is a stupid rip off of The Da Vinci Code produced by the indestructible Jerry Bruckheimer. The picture, whose researchers seem to have spent more time than is healthy in the Internet's darkest corners, sends Cage's adventurer on a chase around many of America's heritage sites - the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, Some Church or Other - in search of a hoard of treasure, which, when we eventually see it, looks exactly like a hoard of treasure.

Also on the trail of the doubloons and gilded sarcophagi is a band of Scotsmen and Northerners led by Sean Bean. The first step for both sides is to somehow get hold of the Declaration of Independence and encode the secret message on its back. But first they'll have to get past a top academic called Dr Chase. Cage saunters in to lay down the law to the dusty beak. My word, Dr Chase is a beautiful woman? It's that sort of film.

If so many swivel-eyed fruitcakes didn't actually believe that America is run by some sort of secret cabal - here it is, I think, the Masons - then National Treasure could be dismissed as harmless fun. As things stands, it is not quite harmless, but it is occasionally good fun. John Turtletub, the hopeless hack behind Cool Runnings and While You Were Sleeping, brings such a breathlessly busy quality to the picture that it almost distracts from the rapidly accumulating absurdities.

And, following the truly mean-spirited Bad Boys II and the fantastically boring King Arthur, it is pleasant to see Bruckheimer committing himself to something so light and breezy. It's still rubbish, though.