REVIEW: Season of the Witch (2011)

  Season of the Witch is the new film from Nicolas Cage, that oddest of actors who showed us last year that he can act with his fun performance in Kick-Ass and his fascinatingly mad turn in Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant. Here, he returns to what he has done for most of the past decade, and for which he seems to have quite a following. As in the infamous (and woeful) remake of The Wicker Man, Cage gives a comedy performance in a film, which was otherwise, perhaps, not intended for laughs.

  Season of the Witch follows Behman (Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman) as two knights who desert the army following several bloody battles during the Crusades. Behman feels a particular dislike for the Church’s complicity in the bloodshed but it is not long before they are back in its service, assisting in the transporting of an alleged witch (Claire Foy). Their journey, with four others (including the great Stephen Graham with an odd accent), proves perilous.

  What can you make of a film as daft as Season of the Witch? It is clearly attempting to recreate the aesthetic of the classic Hammer and Corman films of the Fifties and Sixties, with a brief cameo from Christopher Lee. But while you can easily take the best of the Hammers and the Cormans at face value without a hint of irony, this film only succeeds in being comic. Either it’s the Pythonesque Crusades costumes or the rotten dialogue, which jumps back and forth between old Shakespearean dialogue and clearly modern colloquialisms; or maybe it’s Nicolas Cage himself. He seems determined to gain the kind of immortality that Ed Wood has achieved, purposefully sabotaging his own performance and, as a result, the film’s attempts at some kind of seriousness. From his rather camp stance during the revelation of a mass-death to his almost constant expression of bland confusion, he seems to be mocking the whole thing. During the funeral of a key character, he is required to speak. Cage stands stock-still and silent, apparently searching for something to say, before saying something trite and clichéd and stalking off in an apparent huff. Everyone else approaches the material with an awareness of the guff that it is and turns in good performances regardless, but Cage seems determined to show the film up.

  On the other hand, perhaps the script is at fault, including as it does an early sequence that cuts between five battles when one would have sufficed. And a scene in which Cage confronts a potential enemy with the rather welcoming, “Come off the horse” rather than the more authoritative, “Get off the horse.” Or maybe the problem is its frequent attempts to convince us that it could actually be a true story.

  Season of the Witch is a silly film and it is a rather overlong film. Despite the film’s many flaws, which stunt its ability to be either believable or involving, it manages to be reasonably entertaining. One of those films that will be remembered as a so-bad-its-good kind of film, Season of the Witch aimed to be an homage but it ends up being a spoof.