National Treasure: Book of Secrets **

Like the intricate wooden machinery of an old trick desk made by a master of Chinese boxes, which just happens to appear in the movie, "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" slides its moving parts just so to produce the calculated effect. Three turns of the iconic city dial: Washington, D.C. White House, click, Paris and the other statue of Liberty, click, London and Buckingham palace, click, click, click. Lets dial in some older and younger marital bickering (Jon Voigt vs. Helen Mirren; Nicolas Cage vs.Diane Kruger), some snippets of real history, lots of phony balony history, some inside views of national monuments, and a preposterous hunt for a lost city of gold apparently built by one of the lost tribes of the Maya who decided that the tropics were not for them, CLICK!

The trouble is, all these moving parts just don't satisfy like the first "National Treasure." It is perhaps the work of the fabled Curse of the Sequel, which dooms filmmakers to try to reproduce the effects of a first hit by slavishly duplicating its structure, conceits, and tricks in the second. This curse in its classic form produces a sequel that doesn't stack up to its golden progenitor, but still makes money, so there's yet a third edition of the franchise, where it becomes so mired in its own history and ossified in its thinking, that everyone loses interest and it finally manages to lose money, and puts an end to further editions. That is what we're seeing here.

The first "National Treasure" (2004) was enjoyable Hollywood Trash, a romp through history and monuments with some real suspense and surprises. Universally trashed by critics, it nevertheless played for four months and racked up $168 million in domestic box office. But "Book of Secrets" is deja vu all over again. There's a good car chase, a scary time on a tipsy platform, more Jon Voigt, which is good, some Helen Mirren, which is very good, and a better role and performance by the tech whiz sidekick (Justin Bartha as Riley Poole). But the rest is just too creaky. There's a curious absense of suspense even in the most harrowing of circumstances, a murky plot with a murky bad guy (Ed Harris), and a sense that you've seen it all before and know how it will turn out. There is even, God help us, a set-up for "National Treasure 3." According to ancient texts the only remedy for the Curse of the Sequel is to hack into the Los Angeles area traffic control system, and turn off all the green lights in Hollywood. Sounds like a job for Riley Poole.

Rated PG. 124 minutes. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer Films. Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pcitures.