This has certainly been the summer of kid’s movies. Toy Story 3 was an obvious hit, Despicable Me is making its mark, and even The Last Airbender wasn’t as much of a box office fail as reviews might have persuaded.
Yet another kid’s movie has made its debut this week in the form of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a potentially interesting story that gets lost in the darkness of kiddy land.
The story, which is loosely based off the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” scene from the 1940 Disney animated movie Fantasia, begins with Dave, a young, awkward fourth grader who “coincidently” stumbles into a sorcerer’s shop. It’s there that he runs into Balthazar (Nicolas Cage) who quickly claims that Dave may just be the person he’s been waiting for.
Flash forward 10 years and we meet a still awkward, physics enthusiast, who’s tried hard to forget what happened in the Sorcerer’s store. Balthazar returns and takes Dave under his wing, all the while preventing a group of evil sorcerer’s from (what else?) destroying the world as we know it.
Unfortunately, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was marketed to fall into the same category as live-action Disney adaptations such as Pirates of the Carribean and Prince of Persia. The PG flick boasts the same Jerry Bruckheimer producer credit and “action packed thriller” feel as its counterparts, but falls terribly flat by those standards. It’s not that The Sorcerer's Apprentice is entirely bad, it’s just not as action packed or adult oriented as you might go in expecting.
I for one am a huge advocate of Disney action movies, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice could have been the next epic installment. It had the cast, the plot potential, and the special effects to be straight up bad ass. And, let’s be fair, we have enough dominating kid’s movies that were released this summer. We all know kid’s movies kill at the box office, but when posted against other heavy hitters, The Sorcerer's Apprentice doesn’t stand a chance. It would have been a lot smarter to satisfy all the Pirates loving adults by beefing up the adult content and creating a fantasy action movie that could have held its own.
As mentioned, the cast does a really good job. Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel (Dave) create a great sarcastic and witty partnership. Both have an excellent grasp on that sort of serious humor that makes things interesting. There are a lot of parallels between the two actors, and Baruchel may just be setting himself up as the next Nicolas Cage in Hollywood. Alfred Molina (Spider Man 2) does a commendable job as the antagonist, Horvath, and even Teresa Palmer (Becky) offers a nice charm.
Overall, it’s just really sad how mediocre The Sorcerer’s Apprentice turned out to be. All the elements of a really good action-fantasy movie are there, so it’s hard to know what went wrong. Maybe the studio got scared off by Prince of Persia’s less than ideal performance at the domestic box office and tried to capitalize on the almost guaranteed success of a kid’s movie? Or maybe another run of the mill PG movie was the path all along? Whatever happened, it’s quite a shame.
2.5 / 5
