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75The Sorcerer's Apprentice boils down to "The Karate Kid" meets "Harry Potter," with maybe a dash of "Ghostbusters" to keep it interesting.
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A tamer tale of supernatural shenanigans that is far more appropriate for young children than the sometimes too-scary scenes from J.K. Rowling's stories.
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70Cage will likely not earn a second Oscar here, but he and director Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure) make leftovers into fine PG malarkey with their hokey naïveté and prankish hocus-pocus.
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70The tone is both goofier and darker than the Potter pictures, and some of the magic battles built around New York City landmarks are eye-popping; there's also a genuinely affecting romance between Baruchel and fetching newcomer Teresa Palmer.
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67The Sorcerer's Apprentice is too long, and it's ersatz magic, but at least it casts an ersatz spell.
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67Turteltaub has a workmanlike touch and an easy sense of humor here, and he and his team do a better-than-expected job of keeping you interested in the story, despite it being yet another Tale of a Reluctant Young Man With A Supernatural Hero's Calling.
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65Turteltaub strives to show us realistic-looking magic, without realizing he'd be better off if he acknowledged that there's no such thing. Instead, we get human figures that emerge "magically" from swarms of cockroaches and sorceresses who dissolve into dust particles right before our eyes. It's the best CGI money can buy, and who cares?
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63The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a perfectly typical example of its type, professionally made and competently acted.
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63The CGI is relentless and what you might call reverse-magical: The more we're hit with stuff, the less wondrous it becomes.
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63As fun as it is at times -- particularly early on -- the longer The Sorcerer's Apprentice goes on, the more the magic wears off.
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60A frenetic, overstuffed but imaginative fantasy.
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60Despite Cage in a snit, it's a likable if functional summer-show.
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60Big and brash with a fantasia of battles and chases thrown in to keep the young ones enthralled for its nearly two-hour running time.
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58Baruchel aside, The Sorcerer's Apprentice contains a few minor delights. One is Cage's surprisingly low-key approach to a role that he could be expected to play over the top.
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50The lesson at the core of Goethe's poem -- that powerful spirits are not to be taken lightly, and should only be conjured by those who can control them -- goes out the window, and the mentor-student relationship gets swallowed up in the action. Bruckheimer may be the dark lord of Tinseltown, but he's the Mickey Mouse of this scenario, and the mops and brooms get the best of him.
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50On the whole, the movie is more Cheez Whiz than wizardly.
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50A flavorless family-friendly action-adventure that doubles as memory exploitation. It has nothing to do with either the Mickey Mouse broom sequence of the same name from 1940's "Fantasia'' or the 213-year-old Goethe poem that inspired it.
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50The movie isn't so much bad as it is formulaic and uninspired. In some ways, that might almost be a worse sin.
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50The lively verbal sparring between the good and evil sorcerer-apprentice pairs sustains the movie, but, with a predictable plot, by-the-numbers action-movie jolts and no real sense of wonder, The Sorcerer's Apprentice is really just a pumpkin.
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50A by-the-numbers, good-vs.-evil tale.
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50While Mr. Molina and Mr. Cage supply a measure of well-compensated eccentricity, their labors ultimately serve to emphasize the grinding mediocrity of the enterprise.
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50Somewhere in recreational value between an afternoon on a San Diego beach and one at a Detroit public swimming pool. Either way, before you know it, it's evening.
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50Cage is amusingly skanky, Molina is dependably arch, and Baruchel is engagingly down to earth. But do we really need to watch them play out this exhaustingly empty scenario?
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42While both actors have been hammier and more hilarious, and neither one overdoes things enough to be notable, they at least seem to be having loads of flailing fun as they conjure up CGI scenery to chew on. And when Apprentice limits itself to their battle, it's generally fitful dumb fun.
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40"Apprentice" lurches from one been-there-done-that sequence to another.
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40Other than the Pottersploitation and presence of current It nerd Baruchel, this fantasy-action-comedy might have been spat out into multiplexes any summer over the previous two decades, yet it would seem like forgettable abracadabra filler regardless of the date.
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40The magic here feels machine-made and depressingly state-of-the-art.
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38The movie is a clunky, noisy contraption. Director Jon Turteltaub piles on gadgets and devices in the hopes we'll be dazzled enough to miss the story's lack of coherence and charm.
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38As Balthazar, Cage doesn't disappoint. He's just manic enough to keep the character from becoming too predictable.
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38This booming, cartoonish confection is a transparent attempt to take a property Disney owns rights to, and to try and create a Harry Potter-like franchise.
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38A generally joyless pastiche of sorcery history, imitation Potter "chosen one" Messianics and mirthless silliness, it's another in a string of recent black marks against Cage's Oscar-owning reputation.
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30If there were any brooms in Disney's new Sorcerer's Apprentice they would have to be used to sweep this tired dreck to the curb.
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25Cage and Baruchel work hard to stay accessible, but the computer-generated effects come on like heavy artillery blowing away any hint of flesh and blood. The Sorcerer's Apprentice should be rated U for Untouched by Human Hands.
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25A two-hour trailer: explosion, shape-shift, chase, wisecrack, repeat. Its most amazing trick will be how it vanishes from your memory before the seat you vacate has stopped moving.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 32 out of 41
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Mixed: 4 out of 41
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Negative: 5 out of 41
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AlanG10This movie is awesome!! Screw the critics!! Its definetly better than Airbender. Bring on the sequels!
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dang.3
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RadeM.8