The Sorcerer's Apprentice (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Jon Turteltaub. Starring Nicolas Cage, Jay Baruchel, Alfred Molina.
Cheesy but tolerable kids' fantasy film.
Medieval sorcerer Nicolas Cage comes to modern-day New York to find unwilling apprentice Jay Baruchel, who's been chosen to stop an ancient evil from etc., etc.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a derivative of all the most generic fantasy tropes, but there is a reason things become cliches. The formula makes for a perfectly acceptable, and completely unoriginal, story.
The movie's only really terrible crime is its opening montage, in which a narrator hastily skims through a lot of very important background information that should have been delivered as some sort of flashback at the appropriate time. It's the kind of setup you normally see in a bad adaptation of a lengthy book series, but The Sorcerer's Apprentice is an original property.
Or it sort of is. It's very loosely based on Fantasia and the 17th-century poem which inspired it. The reference boils down to one scene with some dancing brooms that could have been cut without any impact on the story.
There exists a type of role which Nicolas Cage is good at, although no one can remember what it is anymore. It's certainly not the wise, brooding old mentor figure called for by this movie.
Jay Baruchel is a living cartoon: his character from How to Train Your Dragon brought to life. He's appropriate for a Disney movie.
Alfred Molina plays the mustache-twirling villain who could be stopped on at least six different occasions if our heroes were able to remember he exists when he's not in their direct line of sight. Every time he gets around a corner, they give up and chat about what a shame it is he got away.Kids will like it just fine.Rated PG for a vague sense of slight danger.3 out of 5
Knight and Day (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. James Mangold. Starring Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Paul Dano.
Proof that you can land a woman like Cameron Diaz by repeatedly drugging and kidnapping her as long as you look like Tom Cruise.
Knight and Day follows an ordinary woman named June (Cameron Diaz) who gets caught up in the shenanigans of Roy the action hero (Tom Cruise). The idea's been done a thousand times before, but rarely this well.
Say what you will about Tom Cruise, but the man can act and he knows how to pick roles that suit him. When he was a wide-eyed teenager, he played the frightened rookie. When he was a seasoned leading man, he played the confident veteran.
Now he's playing a dangerous lunatic.
Well, technically his character in Knight and Day is a good guy, but the film is at its best in the first act when all we know about Roy is that he's a crazy person killing planeloads of people who have some sort of grudge against him... possibly because he keeps killing them.
That's how a movie that I had every intention of hating managed to win me over. Patrick O'Neill's script has a surreal sense of humor about itself, and director James Mangold fills the scenes with moments that are both subtle jokes and solid action pieces. When Roy escaped a cafe by threatening to kill himself and then his hostage, I was sold.
But I won't let a movie get away without some bruises. A joke where June is unconscious during some of Roy's most impressive heroics (thus hiding them from the audience under a black haze) is funny the first time, but after it happens repeatedly we have to wonder if the producers are just trying to keep the budget down. And the overall plot is a little generic for a movie that's as clever in other ways as this one is.
It's much better than it should be.
Rated PG-13 for making Tom Cruise appear likable. 4 out of 5
