A kind-of magic: "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"

So this was the Jerry Bruckheimer masterplan for Summer 2010: to make not one megabucks blockbuster, upon which a producer might pin all his hopes, but instead to hedge his bets (and spread his costs) across two mid-level releases, using some of the same actors for maximum payroll efficiency. After May's Prince of Persia (co-starring Alfred Molina and Toby Kebbell), a nothing based on a console game, Bruckheimer now serves up The Sorcerer's Apprentice (co-stars: Molina and Kebbell), a rather more winning romp channeling Goethe, which at least offers proof the Hollywood supremo is casting his net far and wide for material.

Taken collectively, the two films actually reveal a mild failure of storytelling confidence, although Sorcerer - playing out closer to home - is evidently the one Bruckheimer's attentions were most closely focused on. It opens in very clumsy fashion, with a jumpy prologue - presumably hacked from a much longer cut, with a voiceover to fill in the gaps/explain what's going on - that sets up the Merlin legend as backstory, and finds Nicolas Cage, Molina and Monica Bellucci running around a castle in eighth century Britain. After that, the film begins to hit its stride, with the tale of a latter-day New York college student (Jay Baruchel) who comes to team up with Cage's junkshop sorcerer Balthazar, in order to vanquish the nefarious Horvath (Molina) and Morgana Le Fey (Alice Krige) for all eternity.

Yes, you can cavil at the way English folk legend has been co-opted to provide passing entertainment for teenagers with short attention spans and too much pocket money; and yes, the days when a Bruckheimer-Cage collaboration could result in a film as gloriously reprehensible as Con Air are apparently long gone. Yet, perhaps more by accident than design, The Sorcerer's Apprentice remains touchingly faithful to its various sources: this being a Disney production, we even get a live-action re-run of the best remembered sequence from Fantasia, with Baruchel wreaking havoc while attempting to clean up his lab space - the difference being the mops are now CGI, the puddles product-placement Mountain Dew.

The talking plug sockets are a nice touch, though, and what Jon Turteltaub's film recognises - more than any of the Harry Potter adaptations has thus far managed to - is that taking a novice wizard as your hero means there are no hard and fast rules, that anything is possible. Bruckheimer has the resources at his disposal to make it so, of course, but the movie pushes its excess to pleasingly surreal extremes. Here's Nic Cage descending from the sky on a GIANT STEEL EAGLE! Elsewhere, a Chinese paper dragon is converted into flesh and blood and scales; hamburgers are marked with the pentagram (surely as good an image as any of American cultural imperialism); a carpet turns to quicksand; hell, we even get Nic Cage delivering a lesson in MOLECULAR FUCKING PHYSICS, which is unexpected enough in itself.

If The Sorcerer's Apprentice wanted to be completely on-trend, it would have made its young protagonist a skateboarding emo kid, but Baruchel imbues his science geek with the same nerdy likability he lent to June's She's Out of My League, forever finding some new reason to fiddle self-consciously with his Tesla coils; his flatmate is played by the amiable Omar Benson Miller, a recent recruit to the producer's bread-and-butter-and-blunt-force-trauma franchise CSI, so the commitment to science runs deep. There's not enough Monica Bellucci (there very rarely is, I find), and both the actors and sense of peril are slightly neutered by the PG certificate - gotta maximise those revenue streams, right? - but for sheer moviebiz chutzpah, I doubt it'll be topped this summer.

The action highlight is a car chase through a Times Square of ever more prominent billboards; at one point, our heroes pass through a mirror into a reverse-universe signified by a lingering shot of the "!OOHAY" logo (geddit?), and only with a no less loving glance at a recto-verso Mentos hoarding can Bruckheimer and Turteltaub think to announce all's right and well with the world again. The Sorcerer's Apprentice is certainly no stranger to crassness, but at a time at which Hollywood's financial and imaginative reserves have never seemed more stretched, it's rather reassuring to see a production so hellbent on providing value for money to audience and advertisers alike.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice opens nationwide today.