2010's The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a Wildly Unfaithful Adaptation of Fantasia that Unsuccessfully Tries to Replace Mickey Mouse with Jay Baruchel
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The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment of Fantasia represents the single most iconic feature-film appearance by arguably the greatest icon in all of American pop culture: Mickey Mouse.
It’s hard to overstate the ubiquity, popularity and importance of Mickey Mouse to American society. Yet the 2010 fantasy film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice adorably imagined that it could remove the single most iconic character in all of pop culture from his most iconic film and replace him with Canuck funnyman Jay Baruchel without audiences objecting.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Jay Baruchel. He’s likable. He’s funny. He’s talented. He’s a gifted screenwriter as well as an actor. But he’s not Mickey Mouse. Nobody is.
That’s a little like making a live-action feature film version of the classic Looney Tunes short Rabbit Fire and replacing boring old Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd with Channing Tatum, Paul Giamatti and Gene Hackman and expecting moviegoers to swoon because of all the star-power on display.
Why making a Sorcerer’s Apprentice movie without Mickey Mouse? Probably because sorcerers are a whole lot like wizards and a book and film series about a magical little boy named Harry Potter made a fuck-ton of money for a fuck-ton of people, including, regrettably, J.K Rowling.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice cynically coopts a brand name from Disney’s golden age in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to become the next Harry Potter.
The film’s franchise ambitions are apparent from the start. The Jerry Bruckheimer-produced flop opens by unpacking a shit ton of exposition and heavy-handed mythology that my brain defensively processed as some stupid-ass bullshit that’s relevant to the plot but also impossible to care about.
I was correct in that hunch. Even more frustratingly, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice comes to a complete stop twice so that powerful sorcerer Balthazar Blake (Nicolas Cage) can explain to his apprentice Dave Stutler (Jay Baruchel) what’s going on using pretty much the exact same language as opening narration delivered by an uncredited Ian McShane.
To save time, I wish Cage’s master of magic had simply broken the fourth wall and shown his apprentice the first two minutes of the movie.
We begin, unfortunately and unnecessarily in, England 740 AD. Legendary sorcerer Merlin has a trio of apprentices in Balthazar Blake (who will grow up to be Cage), Veronica Gorloisen (who will become Monica Belluci) and Maxim Horvath (who will grow up to be Alfred Molina).
Horvath betrays Merlin by hooking up with the evil Morgana Le Fay (Alice Krige). Baltazar cannot save Merlin but he does manage to trap Morgana and Veronica inside a “Grimhold”, a supernatural prison that resemble a Russian nesting doll.
It then falls upon the ageless Balthazar to uncover the identity of the “Prime Merlinean”, a powerful descendant of Merlin who is the only Sorcerer capable of defeating Morgana.
The Prime Merlinean is the would-be franchise’s conception of the “Chosen One”, that magical creature of destiny with the power to defeat ultimate evil. He’s Luke Skywalker. He’s Harry Potter. He’s Neo. He’s a stock archetype we’ve seen countless times before in more impressive variations.
Because The Sorcerer’s Apprentice isn’t at all shy about wasting time, we then skip ahead to 2000 and a subplot the movie frustratingly seems as invested in as all of the nonsense involving wizardry and whatnot.
The ten year old Dave, who turns out to be The Prime Merlinean, has a huge crush on a cute girl. He sends her an all-important note asking whether she wants to be his girlfriend but the note blows away into a mysterious store where Dave encounters magic for the first time and gets the first inkling of his special destiny.
It is there that Dave first learns that he is a Jedi knight with power over The Force. Oh wait, that’s a different movie.
We then skip ahead another ten years. Scientific super-genius Dave runs into Rebecca "Becky" Barnes (Teresa Palmer), the grown-up version of the little girl he sent the ill-fated note a decade earlier.
What are the odds? The Sorcerer’s Apprentice keeps pointing out the many suspicious coincidences powering its plot, which only makes them stand out more in the worst possible way.
Becky is our protagonist’s DJ love interest. The romance subplot seems designed to broaden the film’s appeal. Instead it reduces what should be an epic tale of wizardry and magic throughout time into a story about an affable geek gaining the self-confidence to kiss a pretty girl.
Going into The Sorcerer’s Apprentice I was grateful that the film is well under two hours, unlike both National Treasure movies. The movie runs a relatively brief 109 minutes but it could easily shed fifteen to twenty minutes without doing harm to the film as a whole.
In modern-day New York, Cage’s fingerless glove-wearing sorcerer teaches his overwhelmed protege how to harness his extraordinary powers while his arch-nemesis is now building a posse of Morganians in order to help him retrieve the Grimhold.
These include a jackass celebrity magician Drake Stone (Toby Kebbell) who has been using genuine magic to enrich himself and achieve. It’s a funny idea that dies in execution.
Baruchel wise-cracks and improvises his way through the film in a way that betrays a profound lack of investment in the material. He’s Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, a sarcastic scientific smart-ass who finds himself lost in a supernatural world beyond his imagination.
The difference is that The Sorcerer’s Apprentice doesn’t give the graduate of the Apatow School anything particularly interesting to do. Baruchel’s chemistry with Cage is far and away the most compelling aspect of the film but director Jon Turtletaub gets lost in empty spectacle and mind-numbing mythology.
Molina is never anything less than professional but Cage seems weird restrained for a man playing Merlin’s ageless sorcerer apprentice.
Cage’s collaborations with Bruckheimer got off to a strong start with The Rock, Con Air, National Treasure and National Treasure: Book of Secrets. But it limped to a close with 2009’s G-Force and 2010’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
The pair’s final two collaborations are frustratingly generic and forgettable despite Cage’s usually electric presence. Cage’s raw charisma made his collaborations with Bruckheimer highlights of the super-producer’s checkered career but G-Force and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice are so boring that not even Cage can save them.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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