movie review
Season of the Witch
Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman make a good Medieval bromance
When I first heard about ‘Season of the Witch,’ my reaction was, “Oh no, another movie where Nicolas Cage has long hair and wears a costume.” When I reviewed his credits on IMDB.com, however, he’s really only played that sort of character in ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ and ‘Ghost Rider.’ And he didn’t even have long hair in ‘Ghost Rider,’ but he did in ‘Bangkok Dangerous.’ I guess ‘Kick-Ass’ falls in there somewhere, too.
But if you think about Cage’s collective body of work, it ranges from quirky (‘Raising Arizona’) to funny (‘Amos & Andrew’) to depressing (‘Leaving Las Vegas’) to family-oriented (‘The Ant Bully’) to action-adventure (‘National Treasure’) to romantic (‘Moonstruck’) to horror (‘The Wicker Man’) to sci-fi (‘Knowing’) to downright dramatic (‘Adaptation’). So when I hear people say they wish Nicolas Cage would do something different, I say just look at his credentials. He’s already done everything. And I’m still a big Nicolas Cage fan, even when his movies are less than spectacular. I think it’s his “every-man” persona.
‘Season of the Witch’ is interesting, because it doesn’t fall squarely into a “good” or “bad” category. If it featured only Nicolas Cage in the lead role, it wouldn’t have been as good. The fact that his character has a snappy-banter bromance going with fellow crusader Ron Perlman makes it more entertaining.
It’s the 14th century, and the two friends have been through several battles together, to the point where they like to make bets on who’ll have the highest kill count. But when their group storms a city and kills innocent women and children, they decide it’s time to quit. There’s a running message in the film about the push-pull dichotomy of whether to follow the church or God, or if there’s a way to follow both. When these two warriors leave their group, it’s clear they’re in dire peril from the church, which doesn’t look kindly on deserters.
Upon traveling home, they discover their world destroyed by the Black Plague, a horrific disease that causes terrible sores on people and, eventually, death. The church elders, including a Cardinal played by Christopher Lee, are convinced that a girl accused of being a witch is responsible for the devastation. So they command the two knights to transport her to a remote monastery, where monks will perform an ancient ritual to rid the country of her curse.
Traveling with them is a con man who knows the countryside (Stephen Graham), an eager young man who wants to be a knight (Robert Sheehan), a bitter knight who lost his family to the Plague (Ulrich Thomsen), and a young priest (Stephen Campbell Moore).
The suspected witch is played by Claire Foy, a British actress whom you may recognize as Lady Persephone Towyn in the BBC’s newest version of ‘Upstairs Downstairs.’ But there’s more to her witch character than meets the eye, which I can’t reveal lest I give away the storyline.
But for me, the story and characters in ‘Season of the Witch’ are almost secondary to the settings. The movie was filmed in Austria, Hungary, and Croatia, and I love the overcast skies, ancient abbeys, and gloomy woods where possessed wolves roam. It’s all very beautifully bleak. There’s one scene involving a rickety rope-and-wood bridge atop a very large crevice. I gripped my heart a couple times during that scene.
In summary, ‘Season of the Witch’ isn’t destined to be the best movie of 2011, but I doubt it’ll be the worst either. Some of the dialogue is cheesy, and the violence is definitely too intense for kids younger than 15. But it also has some good points: the bromance, the gothic settings, and some cool CG effects involving demons and other evil spirits. And thank goodness it’s not in 3D!
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