The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Directed by Jon Turteltaub

(PG)

*

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Nothing in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is the least bit magical, said Wesley Morris in The Boston Globe. Disney’s new fantasy action-adventure debacle, loosely based on a sequence from its animated classic Fantasia, stars a long-haired, leather-robed Nicolas Cage as a 1,400-year-old sorcerer living in modern-day Manhattan. When he recruits a young protégé (Jay Baruchel), we might expect a supernatural romp through New York City. Instead, what we see is less a film than a “clunky, noisy contraption,” said Claudia Puig in USA Today. The same “unholy trinity” that brought us the National Treasure movies—producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Jon Turteltaub, and Cage—is responsible for this hokum. Turteltaub piles on computer-generated special effects in hopes that we’ll be “dazzled enough to miss the story’s lack of coherence and charm.” What could have been an enjoyable tale of magic and mentoring instead plays like a “two-hour trailer,” said Kyle Smith in the New York Post. The film’s “most amazing trick will be how it vanishes from your memory” before you even leave the theater.