As the clues pile up thick and fast, Ben is in a race to get to the loot before his rival – and former employer - Howe (Bean) can get his greedy British mitts on it.

Aided by a de rigeur nerdy sidekick (Bartha) and how-on-Earth-did-she-get-this-job FBI agent Abigail Chase (Kruger, Troy), Gates tries to solve the mother of all riddles.

The tried-and-trusted Bruckheimer formula makes this wild goose chase cornily entertaining for the first hour or so, then it starts to drag a bit.

In fact it drags a lot. In fact, I was at the point where if another person wandered into another cobwebby nook or cranny once more, I was going to scream.

The tricksy but relatively undemanding plot is fun, but the movie runs out of momentum, stretched as it is over two hours and stuffed with unconvincing, by-the-numbers characters.

Cage looks sheepish, Voight (as daddy Gates) looks lost, Kruger is prettily vacant, chief villain Bean is half-baked and Keitel repeats his dogged lawman bit from Thelma And Louise.

By the end, the hardest things to figure out are (i) why can’t Nicolas Cage run, and (ii) will Jerry Bruckheimer ever make a movie with American baddies?

Elliott Noble