Season of the Witch is a film about the occult, starring Nicolas Cage. Anyone familiar with the actor’s recent body of work will know that this isn’t a good sign, adding a fourth entry to the ungodly trilogy of the 2006 The Wicker Man remake, Ghost Rider and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The kindest thing that can be said about Season of the Witch is that it isn’t the worst of Cage’s disastrous flings with black magic, even though it has a strong claim to being the most boring. Where The Wicker Man and Ghost Rider at least had the decency to be hilariously awful at times and Sorcerer’s Apprentice had some visual flair to distract from the lack of substance elseqhere, Season from the start is a cheap-looking and confused mishmash of clichés that even Cage and co-star Ron Perlman, two actors not exactly known for their restraint when the opportunity for overacting arises, look thoroughly bored by throughout.
Season of the Witch is a film about the occult, starring Nicolas Cage. Anyone familiar with the actor’s recent body of work will know that this isn’t a good sign, adding a fourth entry to the ungodly trilogy of the 2006 The Wicker Man remake, Ghost Rider and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The kindest thing that can be said about Season of the Witch is that it isn’t the worst of Cage’s disastrous flings with black magic, even though it has a strong claim to being the most boring. Where The Wicker Man and Ghost Rider at least had the decency to be hilariously awful at times and Sorcerer’s Apprentice had some visual flair to distract from the lack of substance elseqhere, Season from the start is a cheap-looking and confused mishmash of clichés that even Cage and co-star Ron Perlman, two actors not exactly known for their restraint when the opportunity for overacting arises, look thoroughly bored by throughout.{{page_break}}
The problems start from the very first scene, which sees a priest execute three women believed to be witches, only for one to reveal her true demonic self and slaughter her accuser. Had the writers been content to show us the women being killed and left it at that, the sequence could – in the hands of a more accomplished director than the perpetually wearying Dominic Sera – have been a harrowing statement of one of the themes the film occasionally pretends to hold an interest in, the hypocrisy of church-sanctioned murder in God’s name. While it would be a little unfair to criticise the film for not proving a fount of intellectual debate when it clearly has no intention to be, by establishing that the film’s world is one in which witches do exist not only compromises the rudimentary efforts the writers make for their material to have any kind of philosophical point (the church may be going about the business in a particularly vile way, but it’s hard to argue if they’re evidently correct about the dangers of allowing witches to roam free) and cuts down any chance of tension in the main storyline later.
All attempts to make the audience question whether the girl that Cage and Perlman’s disgraced Crusaders are charged with transporting to an abbey for slaughter really is a witch are rendered inert by how obvious the answer is made from the very beginning. After all, why show a witch in the pre-titles sequence if no more are going to appear later on? There is the expected twist in the final act, but it’s one which only turns on a technicality and makes no difference to how the story unfolds, except for excusing the onset of a finale riddled with lousy CGI. The only reason the film seems to offer for the audience believing that the girl may not be a witch is that she’s quite attractive and occasionally sobs to herself, which does admittedly succeed in inspiring the film’s most challenging questions amongst bored male viewers such as myself: how much fun would it be to sleep with a witch, given how the potential for phenomenal kinkiness is somewhat offset by the danger of incineration or being torn to shreds afterwards by her hellish lupine minions? Answers on a postcard.
Cage and Perlman should be eating this kind of material for breakfast, but the dialogue is so flat that even they can barely raise an iota of excitement in the contrived ‘jocular’ exchanges. You don’t need or expect Butch Cassidy, but it’s almost bleakly impressive how conversations can run entirely in clichés that will be tiresome to even the most forgiving of viewers. Jocular wagers about who kills the most enemies on the battlefield? Check. Anachronistic modern expressions and enormously distracting bleached Hollywood smiles in a period medieval setting? Check. The attempted dismissal of a meek sidekick (his entire previous worth amounting to opening a single door) who immediately turns around and proves his courage to his companions? Check.
Many films have survived bad dialogue before, but not when taken to these extremes of overfamiliarity and without offering anything in the way of engaging action to provide cover. The entire storyline until the last fifteen minutes consists of the most basic of journey narratives, inevitably relying on enormous amounts of padding to fill out even a running time of under 100 minutes: never before has a rickety bridge crossing – the clichés spread faster here than the plague infecting Cage’s homeland – been dragged out to such interminable length and failed to evoke so much as a flicker of tension. Other delays, including an attempted escape and wild animal attack in a foggy forest, are no more original or exciting because we’ve watched these scenes unfold countless times before, with Sera’s lazy direction relying on all the standard shot choices and gimmicks and constantly serving to dampen any hopes of anything even vaguely surprising or shocking happening, unless you count yet another Christopher Lee cameo in a dreadful film (see also: Burke & Hare) or Festen‘s Ulrich Thomsen popping up in a redshirt role.
There’s plenty of potentially interesting material in some of the fields the film touches upon (mysterious church cabals as ritualistic as the witchcraft it condemns, some visual allusions to Bergman, the fight to keep faith when all the world seems to be sinking into hell) but they are only stumbled upon accidentally and left for viewers to imagine what could have been. With Cage and Perlman denied the opportunity to bring any degree of trademark eccentricity to their roles and a director whose style is lifted from the most basic ‘Directing for Dummies’ manual, the film offers nothing to interest even audiences looking for some straightforward post-Christmas entertainment, let alone hoping that the poster’s promise to “Raise Some Hell” will be followed through to any worthwhile extent. It’s difficult to imagine how spending an hour and a half in Beelzebub’s company could be significantly more painful than this, and certainly nowhere near so monotonous.
4.00 – Terrible (4s are terrible in many ways. They’re bad enough that even diehard fans of its genre, director, or cast still probably won’t enjoy it at all, and everyone else will leave the theater incredibly angry. Not only are these not worth renting, you should even change the TV channel on them in the future)
