Benjamin Franklin Gates is a movie hero of the old school, a dashing treasure hunter with an obsessive interest in American history. Played by Nicolas Cage in the 2004 hit "National Treasure," Gates emerged as a new kind of leading man, one with the brains of Stephen Ambrose and the brawn of Indiana Jones. His idea of adventure is less to scale tall buildings than plumb the depths of the National Archives.

Cage is back in crackling good form in "National Treasure: Book of Secrets," and it's clear that with this installment, the filmmakers (producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Jon Turteltaub) intend for the franchise to resuscitate the derring-do and lighthearted entertainment of Saturday matinee serials of yore. And as a larky popcorn romp, "Book of Secrets" indeed recalls those classics, right down to the opening Disney cartoon short, in which Goofy buys a big-screen TV. (Just like the old days, sort of.)

"Book of Secrets" finds Gates faced with an unpleasant twist in his vaunted family history: It seems that his great-grandfather, long venerated as the man who in 1865 burned a page of John Wilkes Booth's diary in order to prevent the Confederacy from acquiring a cache of gold, was actually in on the scheme. At an academic conference, Ben and his father (Jon Voight) are confronted by an amateur historian (Ed Harris), who has his own tattered page of the diary proving that the Gates ancestor was no Civil War hero. Thus "Book of Secrets" makes its own kind of history, if only to propose a Washington scandal about a page that actually has to do with a piece of paper.

Ben and his father swiftly set out to prove Wilkinson wrong, enlisting the plucky team from the first movie: Ben's now-estranged girlfriend (Diane Kruger) and his nerdy, wisecracking sidekick (Justin Bartha). Leading the team on a whirlwind worldwide tour from Washington to Paris to London and back, Ben stops along the way to chat with his mother (Helen Mirren) about some ancient Native American hieroglyphs, finally leading the whole fam damily to Mount Rushmore for a spectacular finale. (Mirren, following in her Oscar-winning sisters' footsteps by stepping straight into a big-bucks blockbuster, seems to enjoy herself thoroughly as the University of Maryland's most tartly alluring history professor.)

-- Ann Hornaday (Dec. 21, 2007)

Contains some violence and action.