Goofs

When Ben and Abigail are investigating the Resolute Desk in the Queen's Study in Buckingham Palace, they pull the drawers out to try one combination. When that is unsuccessful, they try another. You can see them pulling out the drawers again, even though they were never pushed back in.

In the scene where Ben skids the rental car and hits the double bus, the car supposedly gets badly dented on the left side. In the next scene, you see that the car has a huge dent on the right side and in the scene after that, there are no dents on either side.

After crashing into the rear of the beer truck, in a later scene the Land Rover is now undamaged.

The picture Ben takes with his mobile camera of the document is different from what Patrick gets as picture message.

When Ben prepares to put his hand into the bird at Mount Rushmore, he does not have a watch on, but, the first time his puts his hand in, we see a watch. When he puts his hand in again, the watch is gone, then, in subsequent shots, it moves up and down his wrist.

Although a cell phone can be "cloned" in real life, the "cloned" phone cannot allow its user to eavesdrop on a connection made between the "host" phone and another phone.

Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln appear to be the only occupants of the presidential box at Ford's Theatre, but Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris also sat in the double box with the President and First Lady. After shooting President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth stabbed Major Rathbone in the arm before jumping down to the stage; this action which is omitted in the film. The film also shows the audience reacting in terror to Booth's appearance, in fact they assumed it was part of the play, and did not realize until several minutes later that a murder had been committed.

While in the City of Gold, Riley handles a very large gold brick with one hand and easily places it in his bag. A gold brick as large as the one pictured would weigh in the neighborhood of 150lbs and would require two or more people to lift.

The President tells the Secret Service agents that he trusts Ben and doesn't need them to come in. In reality, the President of the United States is not allowed to refuse Secret Service help.

Buckingham Palace is only open to visitors at the end of August and the beginning of September, when Queen Elizabeth II is visiting other palaces. Yet less than three days after breaking into Buckingham, and stealing the plank from the first desk, the treasure hunters attend the Easter celebration (March or April) at the White House.

The film implies that the Knights of the Golden Circle was engaged by the Confederacy to find the City of Gold. There isn't any evidence that the Confederacy engaged the Knights of the Golden Circle in any capacity, but this movie series is about previously unknown history coming to light.

When Gates kidnaps the President at Mount Vernon, the Maryland State Police are patrolling the water where the elder Gates pretends to fish. Mount Vernon is located just outside of Alexandria, Virginia. However, the Potomac River belongs to the state of Maryland. Moreover, given that the President of the United States was at Mt. Vernon, there would have been an increased number of police and secret service patrolling the area during the evening. Therefore there could have been Maryland State Police and Virgina State Police on the river that evening.

The book storage areas of the Library of Congress are not open to patrons. Books are requested in the main reading room and delivered by LoC workers. Gates and his companions would not be able to personally retrieve a book or enter a storage area. Further, since the President would have had to turn his book over to the LoC staff for filing, the LoC would not make a very good place to keep such an item secret.

The films characters generally have no issues with committing serious crimes such as trespassing, theft or kidnapping the President. Sneaking into the library is entirely within their characters morals.

It's also entirely plausible that the most powerful man in the world would be able to personally enter the library and hide his book.

The Knights of the Golden Circle was a secret order of anti-abolitionists founded by Northerners in 1854 who wanted to invade Mexico, and turn it, the South, the West Indies, and part of Central America into a slave empire encompassing an area 2,400 miles in diameter (hence "the Golden Circle"), not a group of Southerns trying to subvert Union troops as Ben claims in his lecture. The order was reorganized as the Order of American Knights in 1863, then as the Order of the Sons of Liberty in 1864. However the movie series revolves around conspiracy theories and previously unknown history coming to light.

After his Ferrari is impounded Riley states that the taxes on 5 million dollars is 6 million dollars. According to the first National Treasure (2004) he got 1/2 of 1 percent of the value of the Templar Treasure, Gates said the value was 10 billion dollars. Which means Riley would have gotten 50 million dollars, not 5 million. However, Gates' statement on the value was just an estimation.

The missing burned page to the diary was being fitted to check for a match. The loose page was burnt on all sides and thus would not have fit the book's page so perfectly. It's as if the page was cut, someone painted the edge and fit it back into the book.

During the scene when the police and FBI enter the Library of Congress ground floor and start to fan out, several of the officers (particularly the first officer pointing where to go) can be seen to be making 'guns' with their hands instead of having prop guns in hand.

During the car chase, Ben runs a red light to get a photo of the plank. That photo must be from a speed camera, not a red light camera. The text at the top says that the speed limit is 70 km/h. In the UK speeds are measured in mph, not km/h. In most of London the speed limit is 30 mph or 48 km/h, not 70. When they were crossing Westminster bridge, the clock on St. Stephen's Clock Tower (aka Big Ben) showed about 8:20, and yet the timestamp in the photo says 13:37, more than 5 hours later.

The same shot of Ben's hand as he prepares to put it into the bird at Mount Rushmore is used twice.

The same shot of Wilkinson's henchman cocking his gun is used twice during the car chase scene.

Abigail's accent continuously switches between the Saxony German of N.T.1 and somewhere in the Mid-West U.S.

Gold was barely, or completely unknown to the ancient Olmec culture. Of course further cultures found it, and used it, but it was a couple hundred years later.

Never well-funded or organized, the the Knights of the Golden Circle dissolved before the end of the Civil War. In fact, the membership expelled the group's main founder in 1860 due to his sheer ineptitude.

Though the movie begins on the night of Lincoln's assassination in April, 1865, the cipher page from that scene points to a clue (Laboulaye Lady) whose key information is a quote dated 1876. This date ends up being used as part of a combination in the next clue.

Just before Lincoln is shot by Booth (in 1865), he closes the door to the theater box in a bird's eye view of the box. There is a lighting fixture on the far left that has an incandescent bulb in it.

When the fire engines are arriving at Buckingham Palace we hear a US style siren. LFB fire engines don't make the deep electric horn sound like US ones. The siren sound would have been dubbed on in ADR, this is because when using emergency vehicles in the UK for filming it's not permitted to use the siren on public roads as the sound is easily dubbed on after wards, although permission is granted to use lights and display insignia for visual effect.

When Ben and Abigail are fighting in Buckingham Palace. Ben takes a ride down the banister when Abigail shouts "Ben" the sound is before her mouth is moving.

While looking at the Statue of Liberty, Ben says "Laboulaye had to leave a clue somewhere", but his mouth doesn't move.

When Riley is flying his radio controlled helicopter towards the Lady Liberty statue in Paris, the helicopter sounds are from a full sized passenger helicopter, and not the sounds of a small model helicopter.

When Ben Gates is speaking at the conference in the beginning of the movie, the camera is panning back and forth around the one column. On one of the first pans around the column, if you look closely, you will notice that the voice of Gates does not match his lips in the shot.

When Ben breaks into Abigail's house, the camera angle gradually moves upward. Toward the front door while the camera shot is moving are crew members (most likely camera men) scuffling by quickly so as to not be caught on camera.

In the shot from inside the cave before they enter, there's a silhouette on the left side of the screen. After they all have entered the cave the figure is still visible and actually moves at the bottom of the screen.

Obvious floodlights hidden behind rocks throughout the climactic cave scenes.

The Miniature Stature of Liberty is located on the Seine in Paris, but not in the spot that the movie portrays.

During the scene at Mt. Rushmore where it shows them climbing to a lake behind the sculpture. There is no lake directly behind Mt. Rushmore. The lake is actually Sylvan Lake in Custer State Park 5.7mi SSW.

If Estevanico was taken to Cibola by Native Americans they would have walked, the journey from Florida to South Dakota would take months to complete much less walking back to be picked up by a Spanish ship and taken back to Europe. Total time would be around a year after the shipwreck occurred.

Several desks were made from the dismantled timbers of the HMS Resolute. One of those desks is the desk sitting in the Oval Office, which has been used by just about every President since Rutherford B. Hayes, who first received it as a gift from Queen Victoria in 1880. However, there is no twin desk that is a replica of the one in White House, and none of the desks are in Buckingham Palace.

When Riley is in the restroom at Buckingham Palace, the toilet in the booth that he chose is clearly an American-style toilet, and not a British toilet that would normally be present at Buckingham Palace. (The scene was filmed in a hotel in Los Angeles.)

Throughout the entire London car chase, not one single police car is seen, despite the shots being fired, vehicles being wrecked, dozens of traffic violations and tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage to property. Given that this is supposedly in the centre of London, where on any given day there are more than a dozen police cars just driving along in the same place in ten minutes, the lack of police presence is fairly implausible.

The President is familiar with the Book of Secrets. He knows the call number and the number of the combination lock off the top of his head. But he asks Ben to check page 47 for him, as if he had never looked at the book himself. It seems inconceivable that a president would not have read the book, but this would mean that every president since Coolidge knew about the treasure, and Ben had discovered nothing new.

There is no reason for the FBI to be interested in: (1) Ben Gates' ancestor being implicated in the Lincoln assassination, or (2) Mitch Wilkinson turning up at a lecture on the assassination with a page from the Booth diary. There is no reason to start a discussion about this, let alone start an investigation.

The President reveals the six-dial combination lock and the door code to the XY section of the library to Ben. Ben tries to remember the codes by saying them out loud three times before he gets into his dad's car. He never mentions about them again until he meets about with Abigail and Riley at the Library. It takes about 30 minutes to an hour to go to the Library of Congress from Mount Vernon. It would have been impossible for him to remember all those code numbers for that length of time with all those distractions. He would have also gotten them all mixed up too.

After Ben takes a picture of the slightly-altered presidential seal from the president's resolute desk, he shows it to Riley and Abigail. Riley says that he knows something that they both don't already know. He also says that it's written somewhere in his novel, "The Templar Treasure". If he is seeing the altered presidential seal for the very first time, it would be impossible for it to have already been written in his novel.

After Riley jumps into his shiny red Ferrari, a reflection is seen in the car's paint on screen left.

In the scene at the egg roll, the child says that Booth crossed the only bridge open out of Washington to escape, saying it was an example of a conspiracy. However the Long Bridge which Booth crossed that night was indeed closed at the time of his crossing. Booth was a well known celebrity in Washington and simply charmed the guard in charge (who was unaware of the assassination) into letting him across after hours.

When Ben first finds the wooden board containing "pre-columbian" writing, he remarks that "These markings look Incan or Aztec." In fact the Inca never developed a formal writing system.

During the infiltration of Buckingham Palace, Gates states that Queen Elizabeth II was not in residence due to the absence of a flag flying there. In fact there is always a flag flying at the palace. Prior to the death of Princess Diana the presence of the Queen was indicated by the flying of a flag, however at the time of Diana's death the palace wished to fly a flag at half mast as a mark of respect. Since then The Union flag is flown when the Queen is not in residence and the Royal Standard is flown when she is. This allows for a flag to be flown at half mast during a time of mourning.

Ben Gates says that the expression, "His name is mud," has its origin in Dr Samuel Mudd, who set John Wilkes Booth's leg and enabled his escape after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, and was thereby taken to be a conspirator. Contrary to this common misconception, the expression dates to the 1820s, some 40 years before the assassination.

John Wilkes Booth's diary, according to the latest FBI research, is missing 43 separate sheets of paper (or 86 pages), not the 18 mentioned in the movie.