What the hell is the deal with Nicholas Cage? The undisputed king of the 90s, the new millennium saw Cage slump from one slice of mediocrity to the next, with a couple of exceptions (Lord of War being the most noteworthy) along the way. Whenever a big name goes through a spell like this, each new project is always billed as a ‘return to form’ for the star. “Cage is back!” screams the publicity, “The best Nic Cage has been since Con-Air!” says tabloid reviewer.
Most of the time this is all so much hot air, but less than a year ago, with the opinion polarising Bad Lieutenant and the cult super-hero hit Kick-Ass, it seemed like Francis Ford Coppola’s favourite nephew had finally turned a corner. Which makes it all the more mystifying that he seems to have regressed back to below average, effects-driven guff like this.
It’s the 14th Century and Europe is stuck firmly in the dark ages. Fear and superstition grip the land, a mysterious plague is wiping out entire villages and everyone is perplexed by their sudden adoption of American accents. Cage plays Behman, an ass-kicking Crusader knight whose hobbies include quaffing ale and killing Godless foreigners. When he accidentally skewers an innocent (but still foreign) civilian, he and his good friend Felsen (Ron Perlman) give up the crusading business and trek home. On the way they stop in a plague-stricken town and are coerced into escorting a young girl accused of witchcraft to somewhere… and you know the rest right? It’s your typical find item x, take to place y, face peril, use x in y to catalyse event z. In other words, if you’ve seen any other fantasy movie ever made, you’ve seen this one.
Cage and his loyal band of misfits (including actual E4 Misfit Robert Sheehan) are likeable enough, but as in any unexceptional movie of this ilk, you can gauge their survival chances by how much character development they get. Older unattractive man with a one line backstory? Chances are you won’t outlast the ambitious young knight with everything to prove, who gets a whole scene to his very self. The one highlight is Little Dorrit’s Claire Foy as the accused girl herself. Foy splendidly takes a mix of The Ring’s Sadako Yamamura and Carrie’s eponymous nutcase and produces a decently creepy performance.
The script is, in a word, ropey. The writer presumably misunderstood the meaning of “fantasy-action” and decided that the dialogue should glue bits of those genres together. In an early exchange, Bayman is involved in a fierce argument with the higher-ups about the morality of crusading. After a couple of minutes of ye olde speak, Ron Perlman leans over and says “C’mon, let’s get the hell out of here,” as if the altercation was happening in a sports bar in Iowa. It seems like a little thing, but its jarring and it kills the immersion that a film like this needs to survive.
To its credit, the film does retain viewer interest by keeping the is she/isn’t she a witch plot intriguingly ambiguous for the majority of the film, and there are some half decent hack and slash sequences. However, even these are badly let down by some very shoddy FX work that would have struggled to cut the mustard 10 years ago. Crummy green screen and unconvincing supernatural tomfoolery conspire to rip the audience ever more from the fantasy world and back to cold hard reality.
Season of the Witch is a below average movie. The fantasy genre is a notoriously hard sell, unless you’re pumping Lord of the Rings amounts of cash and imagination into the project and it’s not difficult to see why this release was delayed from a previously planned autumn debut. Its a half-hearted attempt at a genre that desperately needs a fresh new angle, which isn’t forthcoming here.
Overall Verdict: A paint-by-numbers fantasy movie that contains a few decent moments, but is unfortunately let down by sub-standard effects and a lacklustre script.
Reviewer: Alex Hall