movie plot  

"National Treasure" is the sort of family-friendly contraption where smart people do a lot of stupid things in the service of entertainment. The minute Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), the lass from the National Archives, snatches back the Declaration of Independence from Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage), the man who purloined it, the dastardly Ian Howe (Sean Bean) and his crew pull up and seize her and the document. So naturally she winds up swinging off the side of a speeding van.
You see, there might be an invisible map on the back of the Declaration that holds the key to lots of ancient booty. "National Treasure" presents this pursuit and the characters' evasion of the FBI (embodied by Harvey Keitel, who seems to have moseyed over here from his identical assignment in "Thelma & Louise") as a bruising US history class, taught in Dolby Surround.