The Sorcerer's Apprentice

RATING: B-

Some movies get sequels that they shouldn't; or they get way too many sequels. Then there's always some movies that maybe could've done with a sequel... but it never happened. This is one of those such movies. This one has a rather odd source material; it is indeed based very loosely off of the old Fantasia cartoon. Which does sound like a pretty dumb idea. I mean, how can you make a movie based off a 10-minute cartoon that's not even related to said cartoon? 

The only thing the movie shares with the cartoon is a scene where the "apprentice" in question uses magic (without a hat, mind you) to make brooms and mops clean up the place for him. It's really just meant to be a parody homage sequence and while it's kind of amusing, it also doesn't really fit in that well with the movie. 

This movie has more in common with Harry Potter than anything. However, it is more based off Arthurian legend... to a limited degree. Merlin and Morgana le Fay exist, but that's about it. Balthazar Blake, the "sorcerer," has been looking for a long time for his apprentice--the Prime Merlinian, who can wear Merlin's ring and is thus (somehow) a descendant of his and the only one who can keep Morgana and her minions (mostly Horvath) from carrying out a generic "destroy the world" plot. The only problem? The "apprentice," awkward college student Dave Stutler, isn't entirely a willing apprentice at times. 

This film is kind of an interesting case. It's a fantasy-action-adventure flick, but it's also kind of a comedy in some ways that doesn't always take itself seriously. (Heck, one of the best scenes in the movie is a self-aware Star Wars reference.) And there's also the romance subplot involving Dave and his crush which is kind of corny, but it works given the intended parallelism with Balthazar's own past/backstory. 

As both an action and comedy, it generally works. The action is pretty fun, with the highlight being a car chase scene that involves magic (namely the sorcerers being able to turn their cars into other cars). There are a good handful of pretty funny moments as well. And the plot, while having some narrative issues here and there, is still engaging enough.

Part of the strength of this movie is some of the casting. Nicolas Cage is the main star, and this is one of his more laid-back performances--but he does it pretty well. However, Alfred Molina gives the best performance, playing Horvath with a certain mustache-twirling quality and the occasional hamming it up (no, seriously: Molina hams it up more than Cage in this movie, the latter of whom only does it once), while still imposing himself as a threatening presence when needed. I prefer Jay Baruchel's voice acting in the How to Train Your Dragon series, but he still has his moments here. Monica Bellucci and Toby Kebbell are also in this and aren't half-bad. 

Aside from a few slower or cornier moments, one of the biggest problems here is some narrative mistakes (as mentioned earlier). The first mistake is actually doing the flashback backstory as the very first scene; it would've been more effective to have us learn the story as we went. Then there's some further expansion on the backstory not included in the flashback that's reflected on very briefly and then totally forgotten; and a couple of throwaway lines that feel like they should be pretty significant but also aren't brought up again. And then there's a couple of other mistakes. One is Horvath getting dismissed way too easily in the final act in favor of Morgana and oddly not showing up again until a post-credits scene. Then there's Abigail, another minion who appears rather briefly and is way underused, despite being a historical adaption figure (yep, it's *that* Abigail from Salem) and being rather creepy. (But perhaps they wanted to keep the PG rating and using the "creepy child" more would have been too much--which is odd, considering this movie already straddles the PG line as it is.) 

Despite those issues, The Sorcerer's Apprentice is still a surprisingly decent and fun movie which unfortunately went rather unnoticed at the time of its release. Getting a sequel out of this doesn't feel like too bad of a prospect, especially since they could've expanded more on the backstory a bit that way. But while that will likely never happen, we still have this movie; flawed yet quite acceptable.