After 2004's Pirates Of The Caribbean, something changing in Jerry Bruckheimer productions. It wasn't the shift towards family friendly entertainment or the much bigger budgeted productions. It was the lack of good scripts. Whether it's the Pirate's sequels, the National Treasure movies or this year's flop Prince Of Persia...they're weak, boring predictable scripts dogging these immense motion pictures.
And that's also the case with Bruckheimer's other big budget summer turkey, The Sorcerers Apprentice. As you'd expect from Bruckheimer this is the glossiest, most expensive, lavishly produced epic you could hope for. The money is most definitely on the screen with the best effects, locations, sets and photography that money can buy. But it's a predictable tale with little in the way of genuine wit, exciting action sequences or a compelling dramatic narrative to hook the audience. It's just nice. Nice and colourful and inoffensive, and fluffy. Nice.
It doesn't help when the director is the hack behind the National Treasure disasters, John Turteltuab, a man so incapable of stringing together an exciting action set-piece or staging a great visual gag it seems remarkable he's still getting A-List work (thanks for that, Jerry...cheers).
The saving grace is the excellent cast led by the quirky Nicholas Cage (registering about a 2.5 out of 5 on the Cage-weirdometer). Jay Baruchel is a welcome surprise, actually making his nerd hero likable...yeah, take a lesson from that Logan (Percy Jackson) Lerman, you plank! Aussie actress Teresa Palmer is an attractive and appealing leading lady, coming across as a fusion between a young Naomi Watts and a less moody Kristen Stewart. Alfred Molina is as dastardly and watchable as ever, while Tony Kebbel, Alice Krige and the lovely Monica Bellucci add strong support.
It all builds to an anti-climactic climax where the effects are wimpy, the drama hokey and the action sleepy. The best use of the resources available would to have filmed the cast playing poker for 2 hours instead. Come on Jerry, can't you return to the glory days of Top Gun, Crimson Tide and The Rock?
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