National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007)

This is a pretty fun adventure film that is almost a carbon copy of the first one. That’s one of two knocks on the film and it is a legitimate one. Some film series get too formulaic. Certain situations are used to set up familiar characters to react in predictable ways. It’s the variation of directors (the Mission: Impossible series), actors (the James Bond films), and risk-taking (The Dark Knight trilogy) that keeps these things fresh. Some of that is hard to do when you’re making a family-friendly film adventure. You want and need reliability, especially for the children. That’s why Jon Turteltaub’s direction makes for a solid but unremarkable film.

Benjamin Gates (Nicholas Cage) has parlayed his fame and fortune from the first film into a successful career as a legitimate historian, no longer regarded as a crackpot. While giving a lecture on the assassination of President Lincoln, Gates and his father Patrick Gates (Jon Voight) are confronted by Mitch Wilkinson (Ed Harris), who presents evidence that one of Gates’ ancestors was involved in the conspiracy that led to the President’s death. The evidence, a missing page from John Wilkes Booth’s diary, contains a cipher and Gates begins to follow the clues in the hope of clearing his family’s name. When the cipher is decoded and the possibility of finding more hidden treasure is revealed, the race between Gates and Wilkinson is on.

3/5

Holy Rollers (2010)

The presence of Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Bartha really made me think this would be a comedy, so I was surprised to find a very serious drama about faith, family, and identity. Eisenberg plays Sam Gold, a twenty year-old Orthodox Jew studying to be a rabbi and hoping for a good woman to marry. When the family of the girl he desires turns down Sam’s family, he perceives that it is because of their lack of material success. Frustrated, he and his friend Leon (Jason Fuchs) are recruited by Leon’s ne’er-do-well brother Yosef (Bartha) to smuggle medication into the United States from Amsterdam. Upon their arrival in the States, Sam and Leon discover that they have smuggled in pure MDMA (Ecstacy) instead of the expensive prescription medication they thought they were carrying. Leon disowns his Yosef, but Sam is soon seduced into that world by Yosef, his boss Jackie (Danny Abeckaser), and Jackie’s girlfriend Rachel (Ari Graynor). Sam becomes a reliable mule, but his new line of work places great strain on his family.

Like I said, it’s a lot more serious than I anticipated. Sam is confronted with two serious relationship issues: the first is with his father, Mendel (Mark Ivanir), who insists that Sam continue with his studies, become a respectable rabbi, and his marriage will come; the second is with Rachel, who provides the temptation of physical and romantic love outside of marriage. Sam is also experiencing a crisis of faith. Throughout the film, he maintains his Orthodoxy while engaging in illegal behavior, but eventually needs to make a decision about whether he can continue adhering to the tenets of Judaism while engaging in illegal behavior.

3/5