'National Treasure' is back as a TV show, but it can't remake the brilliance of the film
There is no better line in movie history than "I'm going to steal the Declaration of Independence."
OK, perhaps I'm being a bit facetious. But when Nicholas Cage's character Benjamin Franklin Gates uttered those silly-serious words in 2004's "National Treasure," it helped turn the film into a cultural touchstone for millennials – plus it launched a thousand memes a decade or so later.
Considering "Treasure" is property of Disney, it was only a matter of time until it was remade/rebooted/revived. And indeed, this month the Mouse House is bringing back the franchise with Disney+ show "Edge of History" (streaming Wednesdays), which follows a new young protagonist (Lisette Olivera) searching for a historical treasure, this time a piece of Indigenous history from Latin America.
The series offers about the level of average you'd expect from the continuous march of intellectual property extension coming out of Disney+ and many other streaming services these days. In some scenes, it's too self-serious, but in others, Catherine Zeta-Jones plays an over-the-top Bond villain.
There's so much to love about the original film (and to a lesser extent the 2007 sequel "Book of Secrets"), an adventure in American history in which Cage hunts for a treasure supposedly hidden away by the Founding Fathers. It's got action, romance, comedy and Cage using a priceless historic document as a bullet shield. It is at once completely absurd and totally logical. It embraces its cheesy, corny side with unabashed glee.
Let me count the ways that "Treasure" delights as a cinematic experience, or, more accurately, as a movie that happens to be on TNT on a Saturday afternoon while you have a large pile of laundry to fold. Sean Bean (a blond Sean Bean) plays the villain! Everyone loves Bean as a villain. He plays a treasure hunter in the game for the wrong reasons (money), as opposed to the virtuous treasure-hunting motivations of Cage's Ben (preserving history, being a hot nerd).
The film also stars Justin Bartha as Ben's dorky tech guy (his best role to date, probably) and Diane Kruger as an historian who becomes his reluctant accomplice and later eager love interest. They get chased through the streets of Philadelphia with the Declaration on their backs. They find hidden caverns in New York churches. They search shipwrecks. They find a map written in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration itself! You think it's all too much, but somehow it works.
"Edge" certainly doesn't capture the adventurous, gleeful spirit of its predecessors. It doesn't thread the needle between nerdy and silly the way that the original film did. And without that specific tone and unexplainable magnetism of Cage, I find little point in watching.
But if a cable channel happens to be airing "Treasure" on a Saturday afternoon? I'll be there.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'National Treasure': Why 'Edge of History' can't beat original film
