#60: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010)

My name is Ed and I play the National Lottery because I believe I know how to win it: watch a Nicolas Cage film, pick 6 numbers from within or without that film, and buy a lottery ticket with those numbers.

The thing you learn about Nicolas Cage films when you’ve watched about sixty Nicolas Cage films is that you can’t really predict anything based on prior efforts: Nic Cage films shot in New Orleans are all terrible, until Bad Lieutenant, Nic Cage action movies are brilliant, apart from all the really shit ones, Nic Cage films directed by Jon Turteltaub are great campy romps, until The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which is a massive load of old cack.

The film apparently came about purely on the whim of Cage, who decided one day that he’d love to play an ‘ancient sorcerer’. Instead of everyone going ‘That’s nice Nic!’ and moving on quickly, somehow this developed into an actual film, borrowing the title of that bit in Fantasia with Mickey Mouse and the mops. I say ‘developed’, but I suspect the script took slightly less long to write that the film does to watch.

In brief: once upon a time in the olden days some sorcerers did a big fight and Merlin died but the good sorcerer Nic Cage put the bad sorcerers inside a sort of magic Russian doll thing. Cut to modern day New York and the bad sorcerers escape and everyone does another big fight. Also, the sorcerer Nicolas Cage has to train a physicist who’s a sort of pound shop Zach Braff to be the reincarnation of Merlin? Or something? Everyone keeps saying stuff like ‘Prime Merlinean’ and ‘Grimhold’ like they mean it. I don’t know.

It should be said that one thing the film does have it going for it is some fairly inventive special effects: particularly memorable is a Chinese dragon being magically turned into a real dragon, which we also see from the perspective of the horrified people trapped inside. There’s some real attention to detail, careful use of practical effects, and a sense of what’s actually spectacular as opposed to ‘fling a much computer generated shit at the screen as possible’.

But what a colossal waste of everyone’s time that is when the script’s so miserably half-hearted. Hey, I know it’s only a dumb fantasy movie and Nic Cage is probably going to make up his own dialogue on the set regardless, but come on, man. Give me some stakes, make me care about stuff. Don’t just write the word Merlin loads as though I’m going to be impressed by that.

Cage is supposed to be a 1000-year-old sorcerer but a lot of the film would play exactly the same if he was just a delusional tramp. This isn’t a problem per se: his delivery of the line ‘unless you want him to turn you into a pig who just loooooves physics’ is a bit of properly canonical Cage. It’s just that there’s so little for him to work with (or against) — it’s not so much a character as a blank space with PERFORMANCE GOES HERE???

Chief bad guy Alfred Molina might as well be asleep: his henchman is a good idea not properly developed — a celebrity illusionist who can also do real magic. Monica Bellucci is also in this film? And she’s possessed by the Borg Queen from Star Trek? But there’s just so little for anyone to do, other than exposit and wave their hands in a ‘magical’ fashion.

The problem is sort of summed up by a scene which vaguely attempts to justify the borrowed title: Dave the Sorcerer’s Apprentice needs to clean up his lab so decides to save time using his new magical abilities. You will never guess. You will absolutely never guess. You will absolutely never guess what happens when he casts a spell on a mop. Which, you know, fine — but it’s all rather clumsy, drawing you out of the film for no particularly good reason beyond ‘Do you remember this? Do you remember when Mickey did this?’ At a certain point you’re not really making a film so much as just pointing a camera at a bunch of stuff.

It’s a shame really: it’s not like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice could ever have been anything other than a load of old nonsense, but with a more coherent script (well, let’s be charitable — I suppose it’s possible the editing ruined it) it could have at least been a fun load of old nonsense. Why didn’t Nic Cage and Jon Turteltaub just make National Treasure 3, the idiots.

THE NUMBERS

3 — The opening monologue informs us that Merlin entrusted his secrets to his three apprentices, one of whom turned out to be a right rotter let me tell you! For some reason this narration is done by Lovejoy, even though this film doesn’t have Lovejoy in it. Maybe he is in it but only secretly due to invisible magic.

7 — Nicolas Cage is a sorcerer of the 777th degree. What does that mean? Who ranks sorcerers? Is there a committee?

10 — In the opening section of the film, the sorcerer Nicolas Cage is trapped inside a magic urn for 10 years. For important plot reasons like ‘Uh?’ and ‘I guess?’

20 —By the time the sorcerer Nicolas Cage gets out of the urn, Dave, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, has just turned 20.

25 — Dave’s special physics lab for impressing girls with musical lightning is at 225 Washington Place.

35 —The sorcerer Nicolas Cage has a magic car that sometimes looks like a 1935 Rolls Royce Phantom. This is one of Nicolas Cage’s actual real-life cars, unless he’s had to sell it after forgetting to pay tax again or whatever.

THE RESULT

And as if by magic: no numbers.

There are four credited writers on this, and I hope they all get someone else’s gob in their tea.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Season of the Witch