After watching a couple of Below Average movies before this one, the higher quality of production in this one is strikingly obvious from the outset. Within the first 10 minutes, it’s already clear that there’s no way this movie could be any less than Bang Average, and it has every potentiality to be multiple levels higher than that.
The first 15 minutes are occupied with telling the backstory, which is quite compelling. After this, the movie fasts forward to the ‘present day’ where Jay Baruchel plays this movie’s main co-star (alongside Nicholas Cage, who we’ve already met).
Aside from good cinematography, good acting and good action, there’s also several moments of very good humour in this movie.
The only real downsides are a slight lack of plot, a lack of additional strong or stronger actors, and an excessive amount of weirdness as you’d expect with any good vs evil magicians movie.
Considering all this, and the fact that there’s never a dull moment in this entire movie, in the end I decided to rate it Decent, on a part with movies like Jumper (2008) and Limitless (2011) which were released in similar years, have similar star power, similar amounts of action, and similar levels of plot density and weirdness.