Directed by Jon Turteltaub. Starring Nicolas Cage, Jay Baruchel, Alfred Molina, Teresa Palmer, Monica Bellucci, Alice Krige, Toby Kebbell PG cert, gen release, 111 min
IF, AFTER enduring Jerry Bruckheimer's latest galumphing summer entertainment, you wish to get a handle on the film's deficiencies, just try and summarise its core high concept. Simple enough, you might think. It's a version of that sequence from Fantasia– origins in Goethe – that found Mickey Mouse animating mops and buckets in a lazy and hazardous attempt to clean his master's lair.
Well, not really. There is certainly some sort of sorcerer in the film: Nicolas Cage winks and scowls like David Copperfield after a night on undiluted methylated spirits. But you wouldn’t exactly call Jay Baruchel his apprentice. He’s just some bloke who, having happened upon the wizard as a child, has become drawn into his battle with another, more evil warlock over the survival of the planet. (Or possibly the universe. No sane person could keep up with this careering, unhinged plot.)
Nor would you say that Jay is arrogant or blasé about the mysterious figure’s magical powers. Throughout the film, whenever a lightning bolt is conjured up or a statue is animated, he quakes fearfully and casts his eyes around for an exit.
There is, to be fair, a brief sequence during which Jay does actually repeat Mickey’s errors with the ambulatory cleaning apparatus. Slotting into the plot as neatly as an anvil slots into a toaster, the scene has clearly been contrived merely to justify the picture’s misleading title.
This largely useless, unimaginably messy film could, more accurately, have been named I Can (Quite Easily) Believe It's Not Harry Potter.Designed to mop up cash from wandering Boy Wizard fans who have been saddled with an unusually long wait between episodes, The Sorcerer's Apprenticecomprises swathes of endless exposition ("The tremulous Witch of Bakelite cast Bongo the Escalator into the fourth circle of torment") mashed together with action scenes so chaotic you begin to question your own sanity.
Indeed, the entire project (rendered in ho-hum 3D) has the look of something that, once longer and marginally less confusing, has been hacked and trimmed to the point of threadbare incoherence.
Still, it’s always diverting to see Nick chew the furniture. Boy, does he munch.
