Harry Potter is about a nerdy 10 year-old boy who is informed by a wise and powerful wizard that he is the ‘chosen one’ fated to stop an evil force from taking over the world. In contrast, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is about a nerdy 10 year-old boy who is informed by a wise and powerful sorcerer that he is the ‘Prime Merlinian’ fated to stop an evil force from taking over the world.
Of course, the two are nothing a like: one uses the word ‘wizard’, while the other opts for ‘sorcerer’. But the real point of difference is that the former is imaginative and entertaining, while later is imitative and really quite boring.
In the same way the Pirates of the Caribbean series was loosely based on the Disneyland ride of the same name, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is loosely based on the segment from Disney’s landmark film Fantasia (1940) where Mickey Mouse uses sorcery to bring to life a battalion of broomsticks and mops to do his housework. Seventy years later and big-budget producer Jerry Bruckheimer and National Treasure director Jon Turteltaub have fashioned that classic sequence into a generic live-action blockbuster, complete with soulless storytelling, lazy humour and senseless amounts of CGI. Since when did all of the above come to mean “fun for the whole family”?
The film begins with a sloppily-produced prologue that explains how unaging sorcerer Balthazar (Nicolas Cage), one of Merlin’s apprentices, has been searching for his master’s successor, the ‘Prime Merlinian’, ever since 704 AD when his master was murdered by the evil sorceress Morgana (Alice Krige).
Cut to the year 2000 and Balthazar’s long search for the Prime Merlinian – supposedly the only being powerful enough to destroy Morgana – leads him to a 10-year-old New Yorker named Dave Stutler (Jake Cherry). Dave accidently sets free Horvath (Alfred Molina), the rotten egg of Merlin’s three apprentices, who in-turn intends to free Morgana from her magical prison so she can unleash the army of the undead upon the world. That’s Villainy 101 right there.
Fast-forward to present-day where Dave, now played by nerd-for-hire Jay Baruchel (She’s Out Of My League, Fanboys), is a genius Physics student still lusting after his schoolyard crush Becky (Australia’s Teresa Palmer) in one horribly tacked-on romantic subplot. With Horvath on the verge of freeing Morgana, Dave is reapproached by Balthazar – looking more and more like hobo every time we see him — who pressures him into becoming his apprentice. If only Dave just kept on walking like most people do when confronted by a homeless fruitcake claiming to have magical powers, a $150 million dollar stinker might have been avoided.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is essentially what would happen if The Mummy took a wrong turn at Hogwarts and ended up at a Dungeons and Dragons convention. The screenplay by Doug Miro, Matt Lopez and a small army of others (never a good sign) is a rhythmless mess of confrontations that inevitably result in a flurry of blue energy balls being hurled across the screen. Sure, the special effects are all technically sound, but through sheer repetition, they evoke nothing but sighs. What director Jon Turtletaub doesn’t seem to realise that the real magic of movies like Harry Potter is not in the big action battles, it’s in the niceties of scenes where the students are sorted into houses by a talking hat or try to outdo each other during Potions class. Insignificant as they seem, these moments help create a living, breathing and enchanting world in which magic serves a purpose beyond pure spectacle. If The Sorcerer’s Apprentice wasn’t in such a hurry to get to the next bloated action set piece, it could have spent more time fleshing out the intricacies of the world in which it feebly conjures.
Nicolas ‘Crazy Hair’ Cage (Knowing, Kick-Ass) is up to his usual tricks as the eccentric sorcerer Balthazar, arguably not hamming it up enough – words I never thought I’d say – if he’s hoping to be the next Jack Sparrow. Jay Baruchel is as goofy as ever as Dave, walking that fine line between endearing and annoying that inherently comes with the nerdy routine. Reliably, Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2, Prince of Persia) steals the show as the deliciously evil yet sophisticated villain Horvath. He’s the kind of baddie you hope will prevail when it comes time for the final showdown.
While Jerry Bruckheimer got it completely right with 2001’s Pirates of the Caribbean and mostly right with this year’s Prince of Persia (a guilty pleasure of mine), he has lost the plot – in both senses of the world – with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. If Bruckheimer continues down the path of adapting Disney’s classic animations and attractions, I fear it’s only a matter of time until he turns the famed Disneyland ride ‘It’s a Small World’ into an all-out action blockbuster. I can see it now; Nic Cage stars as a wacky sea skipper who must stop an army of evil singing and dancing children from taking over the world, one continent at a time.
Oh wait. That’d just be High School Musical 4.
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