Ah, now it’s clear why Nicolas Cage has chosen increasingly out-there roles the last few years. With “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” - a frenetic, overstuffed but imaginative fantasy, especially for kids wishing a magic spell could get them out of high school - all is at last revealed: Cage is the world’s most successful teenage boy.

As the Oscar-winning actor has let his id out in recent movies, it’s been successful for him (the hit “National Treasure” movies, the recent redo of “Bad Lieutenant”) and even better for fans of bad movies (“Ghost Rider,” “Knowing,” “Kick-Ass”). Cage wanted to play an Indiana Jones-like adventurer, a Marvel Comics superhero with a flaming skull, a Batman-ish vigilante and, now, a wizard. So he did, damn the consequences.

Like any William Shatner appearance, a Cage performance is a thing unto itself. And “Apprentice’s” everything-plus-the-kitchen sink approach lets its star’s excesses guide it. The irony is that Cage actually underplays for much of the movie, but really, that’s the way to go when one is throwing energy orbs, riding atop the Chrysler Building’s eagle ornaments and dealing with enough plot to choke Houdini.

Cage plays Balthazar Blake, who was a student of Merlin in 740 A.D. Blake was in love with another interning wizard, Veronica (Monica Bellucci), though they’re betrayed by the nasty Maxim Horvath (Alfred Molina). Through several leaps of narrative gymnastics, Veronica ends up possessed by Merlin’s nemesis Morgana, and, along with Horvath, becomes imprisoned in a nesting doll for centuries.

Blake can’t free his love or defeat Morgana until he finds “The Prime Merlinian,” a descendant of the Arthurian conjurer. After centuries of searching, he finds him in - yup, Tribeca - where 10-year-old Dave Stutler happens upon Blake’s magic store and attracts a supernatural ring before accidentally freeing Horvath.

But wait, that’s not all! Additional spells (and plot) trap Blake and Horvath in an urn for 10 years. When they’re finally freed, Dave (Jay Baruchel), now a nerdy NYU science student, is Blake’s only hope if he’s to stop Horvath’s plan to release Morgana, raise the souls of evil dead sorcerers (“Morganians”) and destroy the world.

If nearly every sentence in that plot recap sounds like it should be delivered at breakneck pace by a guy in a long cape, that’s because Cage’s “National Treasure” director Jon Turteltaub planned it that way. It gets exhausting, and much of the dark New York-at-night visuals don’t let us appreciate the spur-of-the-moment spells Blake and Horvath hurl at each other.

What should have been a fizzy Disney brand-enhancer like “Pirates of the Caribbean” or “Enchanted” seems like “The Haunted Mansion.” A scene that references the dancing-mop sequence in 1940′s “Fantasia,” from which this movie gets its title, is a throwaway, like most of the special effects.

Except … you never know when someone’s got a rabbit in their hat, and Cage’s pointy fedora turns out to house a few surprises. He and Baruchel (“She’s Out of My League”) make a good team - odd and odder - each of them muttering nasally through clenched jaws.

Molina doesn’t do much, but if a villain with a walking stick and bowler hat is your idea of evil, he’s your man (and Toby Kebell, as Horvath’s Criss Angel-like flunky, is goofy fun). The hocus-pocus they pull is plentiful if not prize-winning. And New York really is a character - not quite as in “Ghostbusters,” but that’s what they were aiming at.

That there are more misses than hits will matter only if you’re above the legal age to drive. Sorcery, Balthazar explains to Dave, is part magic, part science. And, Nicolas Cage might add, part not caring what the grownups say.