Ticket Stubs #54: National Treasure & Lord Of War

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

When things of the past fade, it can be hard to track down certain pieces of information.

It could be something personal and important, like the names of my three nieces, whom I've never met, and were just babies when my older sister died on Independence Day in 1995.

Or less important things like what the sequence number was on a particular review I did for a social media platform that no longer exists.

The former is a bit too heavy of a subject for me at the moment, but we are still in the month of Independence, where we use loud noises and colorful explosions to celebrate our freedom from other white people whose accents and form of government are foreign and formerly oppressive to us. Among those freedoms are the right to bear arms (the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) and the enjoyment of excess (not so much with the Constitutional enumeration on this one). So this week, I bring you a double-feature of Nicolas Cage stealing the Declaration Of Independence and selling guns to foreign countries.

But first, please remember to like and comment down below, Become A Ticketholder if you aren't already, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter for the latest news on my content.

The first review comes FROM Jun 4, 2005 (SW@ Ticket #41: National Torture & Other Unmentionables), a collection of movies that I didn't think were worth going into any real detail about, much less watching.

National Treasure stars Nicolas Cage as a historian who must steal the Declaration of Independence in order to keep a priceless treasure away from the British. The movie's original yet stupid premise is made all the less original and all the more ludicrous by the foreseeable action movie plot twists, the background-izing of the supporting cast, and the all-knowing monologues of Nicolas Cage.

Not exactly torture because I did laugh once or twice and I was able to sit through the whole thing, but not exactly bearable, either.
D-

This next and final review of the issue is what I was talking about with the "not able to find what issue number it came from" situation above. I know I wrote it some time between the National Treasure review and my review of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (which will be getting a Ticket Stubs release sometime soon), but I don't have an offline copy of the review anywhere, and it was most likely published on Yahoo! Groups, Today.com, or MySpace (none of which exist in their original forms). But I do have a date of publication FROM that era (February 14, 2006), and it was posted on the SW@ Ticket Archive (which I am attempting to fold into the Just the Ticket sequence right now) as part of SW@ Ticket Archive #49: Fun With Guns, a triple-feature of Fun With Dick & Jane, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and the Nicolas Cage-led drama, Lord of War, the latter of which was written as follows:

Customer: "Lord Of War."
Cage: "Actually, it's 'Warlord'"
Customer: "I prefer to say it my way."
Well, however you want to say it, this script was written perfectly for Nicolas Cage (especially considering his *COUGH* acting *COUGH*--I must be allergic to bullshit, too--in National Treasure). Tired-sounding voice-over monologues, sales pitches with machine-gun delivery, and run-with-the-money villainics (as opposed to National Treasure's heroics, but perhaps I made up a word. Anyway, back to being sarcasmic) comprise the bulk of this yawnfest.

There are plenty of laughs to keep the viewer moderately awake, and the shocking visuals (a village in mid-slaughter, an exploding car, a dismantled cargo plane, and a bullet's-eye view of everything from its manufacture, to its gun-to-forehead flight, to joining millions of its fellow shell casings on third world soil) act as caffeine jolts to the same effect. Another stimulant is the familiar (and relatable) feeling of watching one man's life go to hell, or more correctly, through hell, to the inevitability of his personal seventh circle, and expecting that miraculous turnaround which only cinema can provide (but decides not to here).

Lord of War: a work of modern art, a slightly interesting trainwreck in motion.

Nicolas Cage: a self-pigeonholed schlockmaster in need of a proper talent.
C+

Ouch! I had forgotten how heavily and brutally I pandered to the "Nic Cage is a terrible actor" crowd back in 2006. Granted, he was only months away from the overacted meme-machine that is The Wicker Man remake, and hadn't done much else of note besides a string of direct-to-video "action" movies, sharing that market with the likes of Steven Segal and Bruce Willis. But at the time, I had no idea what wonders of actual, good acting he would have in store for us, from the highly underrated Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call: New Orleans (no, I will not make an "excessive colon usage" joke here!) and the supernatural swerve badassery of Drive Angry, to modern horror classics like Color Out Of Space, Mandy, and Willy's Wonderland. I wouldn't mind re-evaluating either of this week's selections (or giving the Book Of Secrets sequel a shot) with modern eyes.

Speaking of antiquated media platforms and looking at old content with modern eyes, please remember to like and comment down below, Become A Ticketholder if you aren't already, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter for the latest news on my content. Tomorrow, a building implosion goes wrong, and fairy tale characters wear bikinis in this week's Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective.

Schlockmaster Of Tickets,

Out.