Magic Vanishes in Sorcerer’s Apprentice
For a thousand years Balthazar (Nicolas Cage) has been scouring the globe searching for the Great Merlinian, a powerful sorcerer he will train and the only person capable of destroying the wicked Morgana (Alice Krige). While she’s currently trapped it is only a matter of time until this powerfully evil sorceress makes her escape, and with the cunning Horvath (Alfred Molina) working tirelessly to see this happen Balthazar had better find his protégé soon or else the world as we know it will cease to exist.
Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel in The Sorcerer's Apprentice © Walt Disney Pictures
Thankfully he’s found his man in the form of bumbling, unconfident college student and scientific prodigy Dave (Jay Baruchel). They’d actually met ten years prior but events then spiraled so out of control the youngster did everything he could to convince himself they never took place. Now, a decade to the day later, he’s suddenly faced with the prospect of being the Earth’s lone savior, a fact that might have him even more nervous than the prospect of asking love of his life Becky (Teresa Palmer) out on a date.
Going into The Sorcerer’s Apprentice I thought Disney’s idea to take their beloved short starring Mickey Mouse from Fantasia and turn it into a full blown live-action motion picture was as bad idea as any the studio has had in ages. The trailers were unappealing and just the very thought of sitting through what appeared to be a monstrosity didn’t exactly make me all that enthused.
Color me surprised at the fact that, for a good half of its running time, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice wasn’t just palatable it was actually quite entertaining. Sure the story and screenplay (credited to five different writers) wasn’t all that inspired, and yes what was going on bordered on nonsense, but for a large portion of the running time everyone was having such a jolly good time darn it if I just didn’t care. I liked the character of Dave, though Cage was more than just phoning it in as his mentor Balthazar and positively loved the way Molina was going about chewing up the scenery. The movie was fun, and even if I knew it was all hogwash the spell it was casting upon me was working all the same.
But then comes that tedious and tired second half. Starting with the scene you know is coming (they just had to interpret the animated short at some point, it was pretty much required) the film starts to get increasingly lazy and even more disjointed as it goes along. The fun begins to dissipate and boredom begins to settle in. A movie I was very surprised to be enjoying suddenly becomes tiresome, and by the time the special effects-filled climax occurred I just about turned on the picture completely.
Pity, because for a while there it really did seem like Disney, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure, While You Were Sleeping) and company had something going here. In sort of an old school sort of way the studio had managed to tap into the same kind of magical child-like whimsy that made perennial chestnuts like Escape from Witch Mountain and Bedknobs and Broomsticks such fanciful delights. Cast to perfection, directed with a breezy effortlessness, the movie had the potential to be much like its predecessors a matinee-ready diversion fit for the whole family, the silliness of the premise only adding to its intoxicatingly lighthearted charm.
Sadly the final product is another in a long line of victims of the more is more and bigger is better school of modern day Hollywood filmmaking. You can’t have a film called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice without spectacle, but this picture overloads so much upon just that it ends up drowning out its characters, diminishing its story and erasing the majority of its charms. Starting with a nonsensical car chase and then concluding with a boringly lame final confrontation between the wisecracking hero and the shockingly one-note vaporous villainess the movie beats a dead horse, everything falling to pieces so completely it’s a wonder they were ever assembled into something intriguing to being with.
I will say that while Baruchel is essentially reprising the character he voiced in How to Train Your Dragon he does manage to make enough of an impression I’m curious to see where he goes from here. He’s a charming enough actor and while I imagine his shtick could grow lame in the long run for right now at least I’m going to continue to call myself a fan. Additionally, as cheeky and as obvious as Molina’s performance here is I’d by lying if I didn’t admit to enjoying every last ounce of it all the same. Like The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time he’s picking up a paycheck, sure, but as long as he keeps doing so with such effervescent jubilation I’m not about to start complaining.
The bottom line is that kids, especially pre-teens, are probably going to enjoy this even with the lameness of the last half. Parents, on the other hand, probably not so much, the problems outweighing the positives by such a large margin no amount of slight of hand would ever be able to hide that fact. For my part, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was a movie I was surprised to be enjoying. But like a magician vanishing behind a puff of smoke that enjoyment rapidly disappeared, and the only bit of magic remaining by the end was the slightest remembrance that I ever was fond of the darn thing in the first place.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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