The
Sorcerer's Apprentice
The
Walt Disney Company has been systematically remaking pretty much every title
in its huge library over the past couple of decades. Still, when I heard of
this film – which shares the famous Disney title of a legendary Mickey Mouse
short musical section from the classic movie Fantasia, I thought:
They can’t be remaking that? Right???
After all, the short was just that – a short – and one with very little
storyline, more of a visual extravaganza with Mickey and dancing mops, soaps
and brooms.
When
the coming attractions trailers came for this film came out, it reassured me
a bit. It had Nicolas Cage in his crazy mentor
mode and Jay Baruchel in his lovable nebbish mode fighting off dragons and
having high-speed car chases through modern New York City.
It
must be that Disney was just using a classic title for a totally unrelated
story.
And
it is. But…
In
the middle of this modern action/adventure film, they have shoehorned in a
“tribute” to the original movie, a live-action recreation of the classic
animated sequence – having Baruchel replace Mickey as the inept young wizard
who tries to use magic to clean up and ends up losing control of his spell.
That
is a whole lot of finagling just to be able to use the “Inspired by”
credit. And frankly, this little sequence makes the film screech to a halt
– it is so obviously superfluous to the rest of the story that any whimsy
and nostalgia it may have to offer is overshadowed by a sense of corporate
cynicism.
It’s
just another added ingredient to an already overstuffed confection cooked up
by Jerry Bruckheimer and Jon Turteltaub – the people behind the National
Treasure movies – for their go-to leading man, Nicolas Cage.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
wasn’t all that great a
movie even before this little sequence, but that part makes the story lose
its footing and it never completely regains it balance.
Cage plays, Balthazar, one of three former apprentices of Merlin. In a long
and rather confusing introduction (which has become pretty common in
Bruckenheimer’s body of work), we get the back story. When the old sorcerer
is betrayed and killed by an evil sorceress named Morgana (Alice Krige, who
always plays a good baddy) the sorceress is enslaved in a magic nesting doll
– as well as the other two apprentices, Balthazar’s best-friend-turned-evil,
Horvath (Alfred Molina), and the love of his life, Veronica (Monica Bellucci),
as well as quite a few other magic bad guys.
Balthazar is given the responsibility of living forever, protecting the
world from the doll and searching the world for a new sorcerer who will be
able to finally vanquish the evil Morgana. Good and evil is so black and
white here that the good guys in this film are called Merlinians and the bad
guys are Morganians.
He finally finds that potential sorcerer in Dave (Baruchel), an NYU science
geek who had stumbled into Balthazar’s Greenwich Village antiques shop as a
boy. Ten years later he is a struggling but brilliant scientific student
who has no idea he has magical powers. However, Dave has no interest in
saving the world. All he cares about is winning over his gorgeous long-time
crush Becky (Teresa Palmer).
Ironically, in the DVD outtakes, in one scene that didn’t make the cut, Cage
uses a line that incorporates another recent Baruchel movie title, “I’m not
saying she’s out of your league.” But, yes, she really is.
At least Cage didn’t say, “I’m not telling you how to train your dragon” –
because there is one of those here, too.
The rest of the movie consists of Balthazar teaching Dave the ways of the
wizard while Dave starts to chastely romance Becky – who starts seeing
something in him due to his rising confidence. Meanwhile, Horvath has
escaped the nesting doll and wants to find and kill Dave and free Morgana to
destroy the world.
All of this leads to a climactic battle on Wall Street – in a nice if not
totally subtle jibe about good and evil. This climax is typical Bruckheimer
stuff, as special effects it is very impressive looking but if you think
about it, it really doesn’t make all the much sense.
Then again, sadly, you can say that about the entire movie.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2010 PopEntertainment.com.
All rights reserved. Posted: November 20, 2010.
