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Balthazar (executive producer Nicolas Cage) instructs young Dave (Jay Baruchel) on how to be “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” |
Look, if you’re making a feature film based on a classic Walt Disney animated short, the first obligation you have is to make your movie as good as the short. Right?
That doesn’t happen in Jon Turteltaub’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a generic, special-effects-driven hodgepodge of clichés and conventions.
Disney’s groundbreaking 1940 musical “Fantasia” featured Mickey Mouse as a sorcerer’s apprentice, a novice who uses his limited powers to animate brooms, mops and buckets to clean up the den, a job he was assigned to do.
Turteltaub’s movie doesn’t exactly pay homage to its source. It pays lip service.
The effects scene involving renegade mops, brooms and buckets going crazy pops up in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” almost as a begrudging obligation, a kiss-off.
Dave the apprentice (played by Jay Baruchel) loses control of his janitorial tools, making a mess of things until miffed sorcerer Balthazar (Nicolas Cage) arrives to set things right.
That’s it? Yep.
The rest of “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is a downright silly comic fantasy about a malevolent sorcerer named Horwath (Alfred Molina), Balthazar’s well-dressed nemesis who escapes from a magic Russian nesting doll.
Horwath intends to unleash another doll-incarcerated wizard, the evil Morgana Le Fay (Alice Krige) who wants to conquer the world.
The only person who can stop Le Fay is “the prime Merlinian,” a mystery descendant of King Arthur’s Merlin, the wizard who trapped her in the doll, guarded for centuries by Merlin’s student, Balthazar. (Read more…)