National Treasure

Directed by John Turteltaub

Walt Disney Pictures

Yes, the previews are true: this is a movie about a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence

People say that Nick Cage’s career has been going downhill since The Rock. I say thee nay! He pulled off a tour-de-force that had me fooled for about 20 minutes that he was destined for immortality when he got shot in Con Air and didn’t flinch or anything. But he couldn’t pull the wool over our eyes forever. We know those were fake bullets, man.

So now Nick has a new blockbuster film, National Treasure. I’d have to say that movie should be renamed before it is released from National Treasure to National Blunder. It sucked. I guess Jerry Bruckheimer thought that no one actually saw King Arthur, so he figured he could take another ride on his Pirates of The Caribbean coattails for the second time in five months.

National Treasure is about a third-generation treasure hunter searching for the greatest treasure the world has ever known, ever. Cage, who seems to have convinced himself that he’s a modern day Juan Ponce De Leon, runs around like an idiot, examining money like a McDonald’s cashier dubious about a customer paying for an item on the dollar menu with a 10-dollar bill. At one point in the film, Cage’s sidekick, a first generation treasure hunter played by Justin Bartha—I know what you’re thinking: sooooo J.V.—cracks an ironic smile and asks his fellow treasure hunters, “Who wants to go down the creepy tunnel inside the tomb first?”

Unbeknownst to the trusty helper Bartha, his query actually captures the essence of the burden placed on the spectator in seeing this half-assed movie. Who in fact wants to go down a creepy tunnel of a movie? I don’t think you do. Personally, I wish I had not. Or at least I wish I that tomb had something a lot cooler inside than this crap.

I have a piece of advice for you, Bruckheimer: Stick to your own treasure, pirates, and just call it a day. Still, part of me feels bad for the tired producer. I mean, he followed the formula for success. The title includes not one, but two words that usually have the recipe for box office bank. I mean, “National.” Wow. And what about “Treasure?” For a second I thought that the movie was actually a sequel to Pirates.

But the movie is lacking something. It definitely was not Jon Voight, the consummate professional, who came through with a performance that rivals the one he turned in for The Karate Dog as his personal best in 2004. Maybe what it lacked was a good script, decent plot, and solid acting. Step it up, Jerry.

—Theodore B. Bressman

The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie

Paramount Pictures

Directed by Sherm Cohen, Stephen Hillenburg and Mark Osborne

So I was expecting to dislike The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie when I rolled into the Loews Boston Common Theater at 10 a.m. last Saturday. Sandwiched between two seven-year-olds, I began to question my life purpose, but when the film began, I began to realize what everyone’s always talking about. Well, maybe I didn’t really understand what everyone was talking about in terms of the subversive messages that the film supposedly projects to its mature audience, but I was certainly entertained.

The film begins with SpongeBob dejected that his boss, Krusty Krab, did not promote him to manager of the local burger bodega. However, when Krusty Krab is framed, SpongeBob must exonerate his boss to get the promotion he seeks and prove to himself that he is a man.

The film takes the audience on a fantasy underwater ride through the depths of a sponge’s soul, testing his courage and self-identity. The movie is about laughs and good times. At one point, SpongeBob and his starfish friend Patrick can’t stop laughing after someone uses the word “weed.” This was one subversive message I could pick up. Wink.

The film reaches its climax on the back of David Hasselhoff, who turns himself into some sort of jet-ski to bring SpongeBob and Patrick back to their home so they can save the day and have a big party. The movie, I think, is more intelligent than I think it was. It is also quite funny. I would recommend it to any audience. If you’ve recently become a baby mama, step out to your local movie theater and see SpongeBob for some old-fashioned family fun. With all-star additions like the aforementioned Hasselhoff, Alec Baldwin and the lovely Scarlett Johansson, this movie receives three sponges and a starfish.

—Theodore B. Bressman

Finding Neverland

Directed by Marc Forster

Miramax Films

Art imitates life; after all, we can only work with what we see. Sometimes—or even frequently—life imitates art. Beneath these well-known aphorisms is something more profound and meaningful: fantasy. Fantasy can also imitate life and, as Finding Neverland lovingly shows, life can imitate fantasy, too.

In his newest film, director Marc Forster makes a drastic break from his previous work. In Monster’s Ball, he explored themes of racism, deceit and capital punishment; in short, he depicted reality at its darkest. Finding Neverland couldn’t be more different. Johnny Depp plays James “J.M.” Barrie, in the process of writing his masterwork Peter Pan. Like most of Depp’s characters, Barrie is more than a little strange. He lives in an odd mix of the real world—London in 1904—and his own imagination, a combination that Forster masterfully depicts by intercutting shots of Barrie’s London and his fantasy world. This kind of trick has the potential to devolve into a gimmick, but Forster doesn’t overindulge and, as a result, these rare and privileged views into Barrie’s mind remain are fantastical and awe-inspiring.

This is not to say that Barrie leads an idyllic life; this isn’t a Disney fairy tale, after all. His last play was a flop, his marriage has deteriorated to the point that he and his wife (played by Radha Mitchell) barely speak to one another, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, he prefers the company of his dog and his own imagination to most of his peers. This all changes, however, when he meets a family of muses in the park one afternoon. Barrie quickly befriends Sylvia Llewelyn Davies—played with daring and grace by Kate Winslet—and her four sons Michael, Jack, George and Peter to their mutual benefit; Barrie needs them for inspiration and to inject some warmth into what was rapidly becoming a hollow life and they need him to help them get over the recent death of Sylvia’s husband, the boys’ father. Peter, played by 12-year old Freddie Highmore, has been especially affected by his father’s death. It is only with the introduction of James’s imaginative story-telling abilities that he begins to enjoy life again.

Wearing Depp’s signature wide-eyed, magically faraway look, Barrie brings a much-needed world of fantasy to this family’s life. He does not bring escape from reality, but merely a nuance of it, a lens through which to view the world in one’s own terms. Neither the film nor James skirt around the harsh and depressing facts of life, but the reality they present is tinted with the innocence of fantasy, a fantasy which—in the form of Peter Pan—both takes cues from and strongly influences real life.

Depp, Winslet, Highmore and Julie Christie—who plays Sylvia’s domineering mother—all deliver strong performances, adding a level of sophisticated emotion, grounding the film in a paradoxically fantastical reality. Occasionally, the tone can be a little too sweet and sentimental: this is not a movie for the hard of heart. However, like Peter Pan says, if you really believe, at times the movie feels like it’s flying.

—Steven N. Jacobs