Director: Jon Turteltaub
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Harvey Keitel, Jon Voight, Diane Kruger
Have I Seen it Before: Yes…
I think.
Did I Like It: This movie has a certain place in the mythology of my house. My wife (then girlfriend) and I were on a road-trip to Washington DC to attend the Rally To Restore Sanity/Fear in 2010. It was a miserable trip, packed for days into a bus filled with other Oklahomans who apparently could only subsist on a diet of all-you-can-eat buffets. What’s more, we missed the Rally. My intention was to propose to Lora as close as possible to the command module Columbia, but an absolutely packed National Mall made that impossible.
So, I proposed in front of the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives.
That’s it. That’s the whole anecdote, and the primary reason why everyone in my family gets a wry smile on their face whenever the subject of the film comes out.
And so, I’m watching it like it’s been a family tradition to watch it repeatedly. And I’m not remembering much of it. Like, I kept expecting Christopher Plummer to show up again. I even remembered him showing up again in the movie, but he doesn’t show up.
Why is that? Could it be that it’s a pretty forgettable movie? A smoothed-out Disneyfied heist movie that would feel inaccurate to anyone who had so much as heard of American History? A weird commercial for the Freemasons? Could it feature a weirdly sedated Nicolas Cage, the one film actor in all of cinema who you bring on to add an undercurrent of crazy to the proceedings? Is it possible the score is a weird mish-mash of high-action epic and forensic procedural?
No, it’s probably none of those things. Ultimately, it’s probably the fact that the rotunda at the National Archives are nowhere near that brightly lit, because I’ve been there.