At the very beginning of Dominic Sena’s Season of the Witch, three women are hanged and then drowned for suspected witchery; presuming that isn’t enough, the local priest drags their bodies out of the river and prepares to burn them.
And then – wouldn’t you know it – one of them pops back to life as a demonic witch, presented here as a super-powered amalgamation of horror/fantasy baddie clichés.
OK, so there really were witches. Season of the Witch might seem to legitimize the medieval witch hunting, or hey, take it a step further, the witch hunting in contemporary US politics.
It might be offensive if it were intelligent enough to grasp the message it’s conveying, but one thing I cannot accuse the film of is intelligence; no, it’s just an excuse to throw cheap CGI at us, any underlying theme purely unintentional.
The film opens with some brightly-lit battle scenes as Templar Knights Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman) slaughter thousands in the name of God and the church before having a crisis of conscience. Each 10-second, PG-13 battle comes with handy “Siege of…” labels; otherwise, you’d swear they only changed the lens filter and CGI backdrop.
After that, we’re plunged into a world of (literal) darkness as our now-deserter heroes agree to transport a suspected witch (Claire Foy) to a group of monks in an isolated monastery in order to, ahem, cure the Black Plague. The remainder of the film is so underlit – an effort, I presume, to hide some particularly shoddy CGI work – that we frequently cannot make out what is going on.
Along for the ride are Priest Debelzaq (Stephen Campbell Moore), Knight Eckhart (Ulrich Thomsen), a choir boy aiming to be knighted (Robert Sheehan) and, no joke, Hagamar the Swindler (Stephen Graham).
I recall an episode of The Simpsons that featured Homer the Thief and Zohar the Adulterer; here, they try to pass it along with a straight face. Foy is quite good as the imprisoned girl, but the rest of the cast doesn’t have much of anything to do.
That includes Perlman, who has more screen time here than usual but nothing to show for it outside a series of lame one-liners, and Cage, who just sits around stone-faced, muttering in a low gravelly voice.
I kept waiting for the traditional Nic Cage wigout scene, which never comes; he raises his voice above a whisper precisely once during the entire film. Few actors have his kind of film-to-film range, from batshit crazy (most recently in a brilliant Bad Lieutenant performance) to here, where he’s so impossibly boring you want to leap into the screen and shake some life into him.
The film only rarely comes to life, but for all the wrong reasons, during a rickety bridge sequence that blatantly cribs from Clouzot’s Wages of Fear (and Sorcerer, it’s underrated remake, and hell, all those other movies with rickety bridge sequences), or a laughable CGI wolf attack sequence (one by one the wolves become “wolfier,” as if they were shapeshifting from wolf into “wolf” – this must be seen to be believed), or the goofy-as-all-hell apocalyptic climax, which attempts to right all the wrongs of the rest of the movie.
Season of the Witch is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, nor is it bad enough to entertain on the level of a Wicker Man, which a noteworthy 5% on the Tomatometer might lead you to believe. It’s dull and dreary and a definitive mediocrity, an 80-minute Nic Cage medieval epic that I daresay you know what you’re getting into when you walk into the theater.
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