Up until 2004, Nicolas Cage was actually a fairly well respected actor, with a reputation for taking weighty, complicated roles and making them very much his own. It seems hard to believe now, but his announcement as the star of the new Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer adventure heist collaboration came as a pretty big surprise. He had, after all, just been nominated for an Oscar, and although he had been in action movies like The Rock and Gone in 60 Seconds years before, this seemed like far more of a departure for a serious performer like Cage.
This seems impossible to believe now. At this point in time, Cage is synonymous with dumb movies with ridiculous premises and over the top performance, usually featuring some sort of supernatural element. Quite a difference ten years can make. But National Treasure sort of kickstarted this phase of Cage’s career. Helming a movie wherein a guy named Benjamin Franklin Gates uncovers a Freemason conspiracy can do that, I guess. His stone-faced delivery of the line “I’m going to steal the Declaration of Independence,” spoken with the matter-of-factness a person would use to describe what they ate for breakfast, immediately attracted a bunch of offers from people saying “Hey, can you take my completely insane idea for a movie and make it seem legit?”
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