By Vic Holtreman

Short version: National Treasure 2 works hard at being as entertaining as the original, but doesn’t quite manage it.

In National Treasure: Book of Secrets, the whole gang is back, plus we have heavy-hitters Helen Mirren and Ed Harris to round out the cast. It’s far from awful, but unfortunately “heavy” is a good word to describe this sequel, at least as it compares to the original.

The film opens five years after the end of the Civil War, where we find out that Ben Gates’ (Nicholas Cage) heritage as a code breaker goes back to his great-grandfather Thomas. A pair or men bring Thomas a cypher to decode since he is known for his code breaking abilities. As it turns out (not suprisingly), these are bad guys. In particular they are Confederate spies trying to help win the war for the Union.

Apparently they didn’t get the memo that the war ended five years prior.

I was going to title this: Nic Cage Must Want A New House, but I might have confused people.

Cage has been doing the press rounds for National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and someone over at comingsoon.net asked him about a sequel to Ghost Rider and the opportunity of another film in the National Treasure series. He seems quite open to these, and I would be too considering that he’d pocket at least $20 million per film.

When asked about another Ghost Rider film, Cage said that “All they have to do is call, and I would love to see that happen. That would be fun,”

When asked about National Treasure he replied:

“With ‘National Treasure,’ I believe that it should become more and more ‘International Treasure,’ …I was very happy to see that we went to London, England and Paris, France, but I’d like to see the movie go wider still. I’d like to go into Africa, Egypt, Asia, and keep going. My hope is that Ben is recruited and he gets a dossier from these other countries about their history, and has to download it and learn it, and then try to go on these hunts on their behalf. That would be a lot of fun for me.”

Here’s a new trailer for National Treasure: Book of Secrets (aka National Treasure 2). I think this trailer is better than the previous one… it gives quite a bit more information about the movie, but not so much as to ruin it.

This movie (much like the first one) looks to be just a fun adventure movie that you can take the whole family to. It’s in the genre that I tend to cut some slack to because it’s obviously kind of “light and fluffy” and while delivering some action and thrills it obviously doesn’t take itself too seriously. Just seriously enough to keep you in the movie, but knowing the whole time that it’s winking at the audience.

Anyway, check out the trailer and let us know what you think:

There’s a new list out (don’t we all just love lists?) of the 20 most anticipated movies coming out in the next 12 months.

Movietickets.com polled 2,000 active moviegoers to determine what movies they were most looking forward to. What’s an “active moviegoer” you ask? It’s someone who’s seen a lot of movies this summer. Over 50% of those polled have seen at least six films this summer, with almost 20% having seen 11 or more! So I would imagine that means that many of those polled were teenagers or in their early 20’s.

Before I get to the big list, here’s the breakdown by gender:

Top Five Films Guys Are Looking Forward To:

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
2. The Dark Knight
3. Iron Man
4. National Treasure: Book of Secrets
5. American Gangster

Top Five Films The Ladies Are Looking Forward To:

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
2. National Treasure: Book of Secrets
3. The Dark Knight
4. American Gangster
5. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

Come on girls, aren’t you interested in Iron Man, a suave playboy/James Bond-type that wears armor and flies?

Here’s a grab bag of news items for you today:

A couple of clips from Hostel: Part II. At least in the second clip there’s a reason the girl running through the woods falls down. MTV Movies Blog

The Incredible Hulk: The Hulk will only be 9 feet tall and will not get any bigger than that. Superherohype