Season of the Witch
The first movie to come out in a calendar year is usually bad. We expect it to be bad. After all, why would any studio dump it into the frozen cinematic wasteland of January if they actually expected an audience? And all of these points are valid. Also valid, usually, are the opinions of professional critics, whose job it is to decry films like this, which, let's face it, don't hold a candle to the Oscar-bait films that are still in theaters, films like The King's Speech, Black Swan, True Grit, 127 Hours, The Fighter, Blue Valentine, and the like.
But I am here to tell you: Season of the Witch is NOT THAT BAD.
Yes, it's basically a vehicle for Nicolas Cage to, once again, have his hair long and unkempt, flash his trademark grin and swing into battle like he does 2-3 times a year. But no matter how bad his films are, they all possess Cage's teflon charm and charisma, and though most of his fan-base have jumped off of his bandwagon, I'm still on it, and I repeat, Season of the Witch is not that bad.
Director Dominic Sena (Swordfish) has teamed Cage up with veteran actor Ron Perlman (Hellboy), and the relationship between their characters is quite endearing, even if they hardly speak like medieval 14th-century knights. More specifically, they play the characters of Behmen and Felson, two knights weary of the Crusades who decide that doing God's brutal dirty work is no longer in their interests, so they desert their unit and return home to find it decimated by the Black Plague. The priests in their home village tell them that the plague is a curse brought upon the land by a young girl (Claire Foy) who they believe to be a witch.
Behmen and Felson are offered a pardon for their desertion if they take the girl to a monastery six days' journey away, where the monks there will perform a ritual that will cleanse the girl's soul and lift the pestilence. The duo agree, so, along with a priest (Stephen Campbell Moore), a swindler (Stephen Graham), a knight (Ulrich Thomsen) and a young man (Robert Sheehan), the group make the treacherous journey to the monastery. Along the way, there are many dangers, not the least of which is the girl herself, who seems to have to power to bewitch others even from inside her cage.
There are some otherworldly elements in Season that are performed by what can easily be called substandard CGI. Many of the early fight scenes were obviously done on a green screen. However, the scenes that were filmed on location (in Croatia, Hungary and Austria) are quite authentic, and there are more than a few scenes that were tempered with tension and spookiness. The makeup job on the plague victims was also very well-done.
In the end, what we have here is yet another mindless Nicolas Cage action film that will be largely ignored by audiences and reviled by critics. But if you're the kind of moviegoer that is capable of putting aside preconceptions at the door and just enjoying a film despite its many flaws, Season of the Witch is not that bad. Not exactly a stirring endorsement, I know, but it's probably the best one this film is going to get.
3 / 5 stars
