Movie Review: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
I don’t actively dislike this movie, but I was pretty glad I was almost alone in the theater when I saw it. If you’re going to the movies this week, or next week, you should go see Inception. It probably won’t add up to much in the long run, but somehow it feels like that film’s box office is deeply meaningful if we’re ever going to start getting more good movies. I suppose if you have kids with low attention spans, though, they might enjoy this one more.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is inspired by (read: attempting-to-cash-in-on-the-name-recognition-of) the famous Mickey Mouse cartoon where he wears a floppy wizard’s hat and gets attacked by brooms, which was in turn based on a piece of music by Paul Dukas, which was based on a poem by Goethe. From this great lineage we get… Nicolas Cage with crazy hair. I kid. If you’re wondering, the movie does indeed include a sequence where Jay Baruchel loses control of some mops, set to Dukas. Actually, it lies somewhere on the scale of Jerry Bruckheimer-produced summer action/comedy/whatever movies well below Pirates of the Caribbean and well above The Prince of Persia.
Nicolas Cage is Balthazar, an ancient wizard and apprentice of Merlin. Jay Baruchel is Dave, a nerdy NYU physics student who may actually be “The Prime Merlinian” (wow, is that an awful name), basically a sorcerer-y Chosen One. (Balthazar even says “Great men have always been called.”) Teresa Palmer plays Becky, the girl Dave has loved since he was in fourth grade. Alfred Molina is the evil wizard Horvath. He works for Morgana, who spends most of the movie trapped in a nesting doll but is played by the Borg Queen herself, Alice Krige. Monica Belluci is also in the movie in such a nothing part that you wonder if Nicolas Cage got to pick which actress would play the girl he got to kiss.
Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel prepare for CGI-generated action in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"
How are they? Cage is dialed well down from where I thought he might be, which is in a way sort of disappointing. It pretty much seems like he mailed this one in, though he does have his moments: “How did you know my name was Dave?” “BECAUSE I CAN READ MINDS!” Alfred Molina is on his game but he doesn’t have much to work with script-wise. Baruchel has intermittent periods of being vaguely annoying but is otherwise fine. Why does his voice squeak so much here? Is it because he’s basically playing Mickey Mouse?
The best part of the movie is actually the romance between Dave and Becky, which is refreshing I suppose. Teresa Palmer is a find and I hope I see her in more films. It is pretty linear, as such things go, but it was successful in bringing a movie with oodles of CGI in nearly every scene back down to earth. Speaking of, many movie reviewers seem to hate CGI, which I’ve never been on board with. Sure, there are pitfalls, and there can be bad CGI just like there can be bad physical effects. However, here it is mostly used to good effect. One of the first words that springs to mind about this movie is “glossy”, which I mean as a positive. The look of the film is another major strong suit.
On the negative side, we have the script, which doesn’t have as many good lines as it thinks it does and seems to subscribe to the “extremely complicated plot for no reason” school along with the Pirates movies and many other modern blockbusters. There is an opening explanatory narration that goes on FOREVER and is laughably complex. I was reminded of Alone in the Dark, the all time king of hilariously awful opening crawls. What is the purpose of Molina’s stage magician sidekick? Or the girl from the Salem witch trials who appears and then disappears within five minutes? There are so many unnecessary plot complications that you seriously wonder what the writers were thinking.
I’m going to say that from now on there are going to be Spoilers. You may want to check out if you plan to actually see the film, because I want to talk about a specific aspect that interested me.
For a movie with “sorcerer” in the title, this movie is kind of a love letter to science, and you almost wonder if that’s the movie those involved really wanted to make but instead they had to tie in to a Disney property. Dave has this huge underground lab with giant Tesla coils (for a purpose that was never really explained, as far as I can tell). His big romantic moment with Becky involves not anything magic, but getting his Tesla coils to play a song she likes. Then at the end of the movie, his big bad-ass line is, and I’m not making this up, “I brought some science with me.” I actually really enjoyed this aspect, but it seemed strange in a Disney movie about magicians. I suppose that they wanted to show him bringing a modern sensibility to the mix, but it took up far more of the movie than you would expect.
So, if you’re looking for a very PG diversion in the summer heat, you could do worse than The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Yeah, you could also do a lot better, but nobody in Inception has Nicolas Cage’s hair, right? Can’t miss that.
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