I cannot claim to have seen this coming. Or, I could, I suppose, but I would be lying and lying badly about a foolish thing to lie badly about. After the well deserved under-performance of The Prince of Persia and given the uninspiring promos and trailers I had seen for The Sorcerer's Apprentice I was beginning to wonder if the impossible was about to happen. Was Jerry Bruckheimer, the golden-boy producer of mass market entertainments, about to have two flops in a row?

Well, with The Sorcerer's Apprentice having just had its Canadian premiere screening as part of the Fantasia Festival in Montreal, the answer is a resounding no. Yeah, it's got some bumps and a couple of wobbles but for the most part this is one raucous good time. And if you're wondering how that can be so, how a movie based on a tiny clip of animation lifted from a much larger film could possibly succeed at anything, remember this: Bruckheimer is the guy that spun one of the most successful franchises of all time out of a terminally boring theme park ride.

The movie starts with one of the wobbly bits, an unnecessary and unnecessarily complicated glop of back story that tells us about Merlin and his feuding apprentices and a little wooden doll and shut the hell up already. Thankfully it does shut the hell up and move on to a clip from Ten Years Earlier that actually tells us something useful but while this bit actually IS useful I do feel the need to point out to would-be script writers out there that if your script needs to go from Far Flashback to Near Flashback to Present Time within the first ten minutes of your movie to tell your story then you're doing a lousy job and should maybe go back to waiting tables.

Useful things learned TEN YEARS EARLIER: A nine or ten year old Dave - the script says both ages at different times, which is a problem - is a geeky little kid with an active imagination and a crush on Becky. Becky seems to like him back - go Dave - when fate lures Dave away from a school outing and into an occult store where he meets an honest-to-god sorcerer (Nicolas Cage) who gives him a funky dragon shaped ring and declares him, Dave, to be a sorcerer, too, and destined to be one of the greatest of all time. Dave likes this until he accidentally opens a wooden doll and releases an evil sorcerer who wants to destroy the world (Alfred Molina). A fight breaks out, Dave splashes water on his groin, both wizards are trapped in a jar for ten years, his teachers think he's making up stories and his class laughs at him because his groin is wet. Poor Dave.

Ten years later, Dave (now Jay Baruchel) is a college physics student who rediscovers Becky in one of his classes right around the same time that good sorcerer and bad sorcerer emerge from their jar and he is once again drawn into their battle. 

That's the story. It goes how you think it's going to go. But that's never the issue with a Bruckheimer film. They ALWAYS go how you think they will, that's why they're popular. The question is how much style they ooze while doing so. And what do you know: geeky Canadian Jay Baruchel is one hell of a better leading man than supposedly hotter than hot Jake Gyllenhaal. Baruchel's got some serious help here. Nicolas Cage manages to stay (mostly) on the fun side of crazy, Alfred Molina matches him blow for blow, and even the supporting cast is blessed with a very cute girl for Becky and Rock N Rolla's Tobey Kebbell as a sort of demented, metrosexual riff on Criss Angel. Because, you know, the guy who spells his name Criss isn't metrosexual enough already. There are some great jokey references to other films -- the Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark ones are best -- and the special effects actually are kind of special in the good sense as opposed to the short bus sense. All the stuff around Baruchel is just fun.

And then there's Baruchel himself. We've known for ages that he's good in little indies -- he completely carries The Trotsky, for instance -- and that he can be the comic relief with the big boys (hello Tropic Thunder) but here he is anchoring a major event film and absolutely nailing it. It's not just that he's funny, which he absolutely is, or that he's able to hold his own against Cage and Molina -- he actually steals scenes from both -- but that he manages to somehow, probably impossibly, make Dave believable. You kind of know this guy or at least someone like him. Sure, the guy you know probably doesn't have giant Tesla coils hidden away in an abandoned subway station -- which Dave does, strangely enough -- and he probably wouldn't know how to use those coils to play music to impress the girl he likes even if he did have them, but regardless of piddling little details like Tesla coils and the ability to blast plasma out of his hands, you know guys just like Dave. It's a rare talent to be able to take a world as absolutely, one hundred percent ludicrous as the world of The Sorcerer's Apprentice and make it believable and Baruchel absolutely has that talent.

Perfect film? No. Disposable? Absolutely! But The Sorcerer's Apprentice is also hugely entertaining because it never forgets that magic should be fun.