'National Treasure'

At the Cinemark

Rated: PG

Grade: C+

Is it really just that actor Nicolas Cage earns $20 million per film?

I hope he keeps $100K and sends the rest to Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity or another worthy cause. Instead, I hear rumors he bought a castle in Bavaria and an island in the Bahamas.

We all know why the Cage bird singsâ€-he's got it all.

Hey, Nick: "From everyone who has been given much, much will be required."

Cage prides himself on method acting, but the method seems to be a permanent scowl. His other method is the strut: Cage seems to swagger even in throwaway scenes.

OK, so I don't like him much, even if he is Francis Ford Coppola's nephew.

But what about the movie "National Treasure: Book of Secrets?"

On the plus side, it's an old fashioned clean piece of entertainment: No blood, no sex, not even much off-color language that I can recall.

It's in the genre of old Tracy/Hepburn or Cary Grant and Hepburn for that matter. Not all such films were classics, but they were entertaining — and grandma seldom blushed.

"National Treasure" is a throwback to lightweight entertainment by big studios. Except there is no co-star, so it's mostly Cage and Cage.

Likely costing more than $100 million, "National Treasure" is the sequel to the original that grossed $347 million worldwide. There was a certain charm to that first film as treasure-hunter Benjamin Franklin Gates sought to steal the Declaration of Independence in order to find some mythical war chest. Whatever.

The sequel finds him on another preposterous treasure hunt: Ben is investigating the murder of Abraham Lincoln, in part to prove that his great-grandfather was not a co-conspirator with John Wilkes Booth. As a sidelight, the search involves finding the City of Gold, which, it turns out, is hidden near Mt. Rushmore.

Along the way, Ben will crawl under the president's desk in the oval office and will even briefly kidnap the president. Not a problem: Ben's got game.

Jon Voight plays Ben's dad, who is very solemn about the harm to the good family name. He seems to be a pretty decent father, although Angelina Jolie might disagree.

Helen Mirren is cast as Ben's ex-wife, a scholar who helps in the treasure hunt.

All of this adds up to a silly hunt for gold, with villain Ed Harris bugging daddy's cell phone so he can get there first.

Obviously, movies like this can be entertaining. The world loved "Indiana Jones" and pretty much liked "The Da Vinci Code," too. So it's not the genre alone that killed the project.

One critic suggested that it failed because it followed the same map as the original. True enough.

But it also failed because it suspended our disbelief so completely that we fell off the cliff to the rocks below. The Mt. Rushmore finale, which includes dangerous rocks on the beach, is beyond far-fetched.

By the way, Mt. Rushmore was built specifically to hide clues that lead to the City of Gold. Now you know.

And it failed because the cast was sleepwalking through the project. I have no doubt the cast parties were great fun, but I can't believe any of the actors — not even Queen Mirren — spent any time "getting into character." ("I'm distraught. My grandpa may have killed Lincoln. My family is disgraced. I've got to dig deep to find my motivation.")

Oh, well. What does it all matter? We all know what the movie is and it's not pretending to be anything else. Go if you must, but sit near a wall so you can eavesdrop on the movie next door when things get rough.