20 2000s Movies Audiences Loved, But Critics Hated

On the face of it, it's easy to see why critics didn't take too warmly to National Treasure, based on the convoluted plot itself. The story of Benjamin Franklin Gates' mission to find a hidden map on the back of the Declaration of Independence was ludicrous to the point of parody, with enough historical inaccuracies to make getting lost within the narrative tricky at best.

And yet, the 2004 outing had the secret weapon that was Nicolas Cage. It feels that at no point did he take his role or the movie on the whole too seriously, and his popularity and eccentricity worked in his favour, as his presence and Cage-isms alone managed to win over a lot of audiences.

This was no fluke either, as exactly the same thing happened three years later with National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and unsurprisingly, when the property continued on the small screen sans Cage with Edge of History, the audience score fell dramatically to within the same realm as the critics.

National Treasure is almost the definition of a fun, popcorn flick, to be enjoyed almost exclusively without thinking too deeply about anything on the screen, and the smart money would say that, should Cage ever return for a much-demanded third big-screen outing, the audience/critic split would remain exactly the same.