SURELY, THERE is a good side to the new Disney film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice—it probably fed someone’s family. But you’d have to be Disney’s Thumper the Rabbit himself to see past the exhaustion of the premise and the stars.
With the exception of the lead, Jay Baruchel, who tries to work up some manic energy to match the frenzied CGI, the cast is walking through things they’ve done before.
Nicolas Cage plays Balthazar, an eons-old sorcerer who dresses like Lemmy of Motörhead. As we learn from the hasty, semivisible opening sequence, he was once the disciple of Merlin himself. Hundreds of years later, Balthazar now runs an eldritch store in New York City.
He is interrupted by the arrival of young Dave (Jake Cherry). We realize the boy will someday be a wizard in his own right: Merlin’s silver ring (which turns into a little animated dragon) wraps around his finger. In his clumsiness, the kid knocks over a magic container that unleashes a rival wizard that Balthazar has kept imprisoned for centuries: Horvath (Alfred Molina). During the ensuing fight, Balthazar and Horvath are themselves imprisoned together in a Chinese urn for 10 years.
Dave grows up, becoming a physics major who encounters Becky (gorgeous Aussie Teresa Palmer), the girl he loved back when he was in elementary school. The romance is interrupted when Balthazar reappears to commence Dave’s training. Horvath is also at large, contending with Balthazar for a “grimhold,” a metal babushka doll holding the essence of evil sorceress Morgana (Alice Krige); if released, Morgana will dominate the world by unleashing an army of the walking dead.
The target audience seems to be a 6-year-old kid who wears his Hogwarts scarf to school every day, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice addresses that kid with monotonous intent.
Let’s set aside the question of whether this should have been done at all, considering the number of times it’s been done already. The effects, including the animation of some large metal sculptures, have the same novelty value they would in a TV commercial—they are just that fleeting.
Barcuhel—ideally cast as the second or third assistant nerd in a high school movie—gobbles away with various goofy whines right up to the movie’s centerpiece. That’s the live-action remake of the Mickey Mouse sequence in Fantasia—the animation of composer Paul Dukas’ tone poem, based on Goethe’s antic, even breathless “Der Zauberlehrling.”
Restaging this sequence live with computer-animated brooms and mops is basically what would happen if you restaged a Daffy Duck cartoon with computer-enhanced real ducks, Babe-style, taking loads of buckshot in the beak.
A few gags work—one of the mops gets amorous and cuddles and tickles Dave when he’s trying to hide the mess from Becky. But the stiff lead up to it all (Dave saying, “This floor is messy!”) typifies the film’s significant clumsiness.
Director John Turtletaub, of what will shortly become the National Treasure trilogy, has obviously cut the film to make it move quicker. The sequences follow jarringly, with gaps in continuity; instead of a faster pace, we get a constant awkwardness, with Dave’s cute bulldog appearing and reappearing as if by magic.
Fans were hoping for Cage to build on his work in The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans, but it’s hopeless. He must have thought he could do something by seeming calm in the face of magic; instead of laid-back and confident, he looks depressed.
Instructing Dave in a magic spell, he says, “You know the drill.” Unfortunately, everyone else does, too, and when Horvath uses the cheap-looking blue glow of his cane’s cut-glass handle to wipe someone’s memory, a character comments, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”
The best way to handle material that’s been done to death is to send it up, but I presume that the filmmakers were hoping that the threadbare material would look funny already if played straight. Camp or serious, the movie fails; Turtletaub and producer Jerry Bruckheimer have delivered something so DOA that all the spells of Morgan le Fay couldn’t bring it to life.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
PG
Opens July 14
