| 75 |
Chicago Tribune
Overall the film is alluringly over-the-top without being overcooked.
|
| 75 |
Charlotte Observer
The film whirls by in a satisfying torrent of chases, escapes and discoveries.
|
| 75 |
Baltimore Sun
A wholesome, headlong extravaganza - a sort of North by Northeast sans high style and erotic innuendo.
|
| 70 |
Washington Post
Cleverness can be overrated but it can be underrated too, and the best thing about National Treasure is how clever it is.
|
| 63 |
Boston Globe
National Treasure even has a rough time approaching the heart of ''The Amazing Race," a show that manages, in 44 minutes, to make you care about average folks as they follow clues across the globe.
|
| 63 |
Miami Herald
Peter Debruge
It's a tomb-raiding adventure movie several notches below Indiana Jones status.
|
| 63 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
An undeniable pleasure of National Treasure was watching a movie shot locally that wasn't haunted by a virus or by dead people.
|
| 60 |
The Hollywood Reporter
If you're going to tell a wildly implausible tale of fortune hunting and unlikely heroes, you could do worse than National Treasure.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Reader
It runs like a Swiss watch, though the plot continuously turns on Cage's liberal interpretation of ridiculously cryptic clues.
|
| 50 |
San Francisco Chronicle
It has no ambition, little sense and false sentiment, but it does have velocity, high spirits and scale.
|
| 50 |
Variety
Tries to combine the suspense of old Saturday morning serials with the gusto of producer Jerry Bruckheimer's action pics. Falling short on both counts, this long, and long-winded, series of middling cliffhangers won't pump the adrenaline of action aficionados or -- the family crowd.
|
| 50 |
Los Angeles Times
National Treasure is as doggedly hokey and ham-handed as a Disneyland ride.
|
| 50 |
Christian Science Monitor
Too bad the clever bits are swamped by no-brainer gunfights, rescues, and chases galore.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Sun-Times
National Treasure is so silly that the Monty Python version could use the same screenplay, line for line.
|
| 50 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Coming from writers responsible for such material as "Snow Dogs" and "The 6th Day," National Treasure is not so much a no-brainer as a brain-stunner, so audaciously ridiculous you are initially intrigued, then soon irritated by its incoherence.
|
| 50 |
Entertainment Weekly
The character of a scruffy computer nerd, played with might-as-well-enjoy-myself charm by little-known actor Justin Bartha, steals the picture from glossier players.
|
| 50 |
Village Voice
Ham-handed to start, with a fondness for cochlea-crushing decibel levels, National Treasure gets more entertaining as the preposterousness rises.
|
| 50 |
LA Weekly
Robert Abele
Can't match an ounce of the suspense generated by contestants frantically buying airline tickets on Bruckheimer's own TV money quest, "The Amazing Race." This movie is a fortune wasted.
|
| 50 |
Portland Oregonian
Nicolas Cageologists will be sad to hear that he's entirely too normal in National Treasure -- he's mildly funny but doesn't make any of the kooky dramatic choices (needless accents, ranting about the orifices of Greek gods) that made his other Bruckheimer performances so much fun to watch.
|
| 50 |
Salon.com
Jon Voight shows up as Ben's daddy, and Harvey Keitel plays a devilishly goateed FBI agent: They're the only two actors who seem to have a sense of how ridiculous National Treasure is, but there's not enough of them to carry the picture.
|
| 50 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Too dumb and improbable to even go into.
|
| 40 |
TV Guide
It's a silly, stupendously artificial enterprise.
|
| 38 |
USA Today
Ten minutes into the picture, you're searching the screen for life-support machines.
|
| 38 |
New York Post
Sort of "The Da Vinci Code for Dummies."
|
| 38 |
New York Daily News
If the Founding Fathers had known National Treasure would be the result of their efforts to forge a new nation, they might have reached for the Wite-Out.
|
| 38 |
Premiere
For his fourth paycheck-cashing run through “J-Bruck’s” action-hero gauntlet, Cage lazily plays Benjamin Franklin Gates-the first of many overstuffed social-studies references.
|
| 38 |
ReelViews
National Treasure's storyline isn't compelling or coherent enough to warrant the term "plot."
|
| 30 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
It lacks the conviction to embrace its own garish awfulness, resulting in little more than tedious historical and patriotic hokum, a preposterous potboiler done in by slack pacing and pedestrian execution.
|
| 30 |
Washington Post
Rated PG, which must stand for "particularly gullible," it's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" for people who slept through American history class.
|
| 25 |
Rolling Stone
It's not just hard to believe any of this, it's impossible. And director Jon Turteltaub (Phenomenom) directs with robotic cheerlessness.
|
| 20 |
Wall Street Journal
Disney's National Treasure is supposed to be family-friendly, a PG-rated action adventure free of hard violence and bad language. That's admirable, to be sure, but with a friend like this a family doesn't need sleeping pills.
|
| 20 |
The New York Times
If National Treasure mattered at all, you might call it a national disgrace, but this piece of flotsam is so inconsequential that it amounts to little more than a piece of Hollywood accounting.
|
| 20 |
Film Threat
Pete Vonder Haar
Has almost nothing to recommend it.
|
| 20 |
Austin Chronicle
Absurdism taken to a new extreme.
|
| 10 |
Dallas Observer
Isn't any fun at all, which is ultimately the most damning thing you can say about a Bruckheimer movie.
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