If you can’t quite face the three-month wait for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull then perhaps you can take solace in Nicolas Cage’s Ben Franklin Gates. This frantic sequel sees the all-action archaeologist hero on another globetrotting adventure guided by the sort of cockamamie clues Dan Brown might cook up on an off day.
No matter. The film is happy to run with its quasi-Masonic offal and historical facts that can only have been gleamed from a Man In The Pub. (“His name is mud comes from Dr Samuel Mudd, who set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin,” says Mr. Cage of a phrase that dates back some 200 years before Lincoln was born.) The returning crew includes Jon Voight as Ben’s archaeologist father, Justin Bartha who takes care of the tech stuff and Diane Kruger as Ben’s on-again, off-again girlfriend.
We barely have time to dunk our popcorn in butter before Ben’s great-great-grandfather is accused of collaborating with John Wilkes Booth on the night of Lincoln’s murder. For reasons that are far too convoluted to explain, Ben must find Cibola, the fabled lost city of gold, in order to clear his ancestor’s name. And so to Paris, and to Buckingham Palace. And Mount Rushmore.
There are explosions and underground caverns ands plots to kidnap the president (Bruce Greenwood) along the way. New additions include Ed Harris as a rival archaeologist and Helen Mirren as Ben’s mother who, conveniently enough, is a leading authority in the pre-Columbian glyphs needed to find the treasure.
Aspiring to the condition of theme park ride, none of it makes a lick a sense but its hyperactive ‘and then’ quality at least ensures you won’t be bored.