Season of the Witch (2011) Movie Review

New Movie Review: Season of the Witch (2011)

SEASON OF THE WITCH gets the distinction of being the first film made/released in 2011 that I've seen and reviewed.  I've been reading about this one for a while now and considering I've been getting a ton of updates on it it was released with very little fanfare.  It's always a warning sign when a big studio tries to slip one in past the goalie and release a film with little promotion.  Are they embarrassed by the final product?  Are they unsure of how to promote it?  Or do they just wanna push it out into theaters in what is considered a pretty slow time of year?  SEASON OF THE WITCH may not be the strongest film of the year but there's some entertaining parts of it that you might enjoy.  BUT writer Bragi F. Schut takes the film, in the final act have you, in a pretty silly direction; so silly, in fact, that this is proving to be a very difficult review to write.
The movie stars Nicolas Cage as Behmen and Ron Perlman as Felson as two legendary fighters (a.k.a., they kill a lot of infidels) during the crusades.  During a siege on some stronghold they are told to slaughter everybody in the name of the lord because everyone there is an enemy of god.  Behmen and Felson soon realize they just killed a castle full of women and children.  As a result they desert the crusades and wander off.  Their journey takes them to a plague-infested "town" (a town here is simply a place that has a designated mud pit) where before you can say "welcome to Convenient Plot Point City," they agree to transport a witch to another town where the monks can use the Book of Solomon (the last copy in existence, have you) to kill the witch and save the land from the plague.  Easy right?

Our stars, Cage & Perlman, disillusioned with the Church.

Along with our two stars is of course the accused witch, called simply "The Girl" (played by Claire Foy); a priest Debelzaq (Stephen Campbell Moore); Kay, an altar boy who wants to be a knight (Robert Sheehan); Hagamar, their guide, (Stephen Graham); and Eckhart, a soldier from the town they are leaving (Ulrich Thomsen).  As they set off on their journey we start getting hints that The Girl may just be a fall-girl and isn't a witch at all.  The Girl even implies to Cage's Behmen that Debelzaq, the clergyman, raped her.  So after getting a handful of clues and insinuations that she might not be a witch, writer Schut then turns around and starts dropping clues that she actually is a witch.  Unfortunately none of the hints and clues either way are subtle or clever but are pretty much in our face and have no room for interpretation.  This, in fact, is one of the problems I had with SEASON OF THE WITCH.  There's no mystery whatsoever about what was going on.  From the pre-credit sequence we know for a fact that there's a witch out there (a pretty vicious one at that); so all the little hints and innuendoes are pretty useless.

The Girl (Claire Foy) may not be what she seems.

The acting is decent across the board (although Kay looks as though he just stepped off the set of an amateur porn video; I was looking for an ugly couch and a potted plant!!).  How could it not be?  Granted Cage doesn't always pick the best roles in the greatest films, but the man can certainly act.  And Ron Perlman is one of my personal favorite genre actors.  Even films that absolutely suck (I'm looking at you, THE LAST WINTER), he's always fantastic.  We even get a very brief cameo from none other than Christopher Lee ... a VERY brief cameo.  But whereas I didn't have a problem with the acting, I did with the writing.  The dialogue often felt out of place, and there was too much forced humor; almost like they were trying to keep the atmosphere from getting too heavy.  But all the humor, mainly in the form of sarcastic little one-liners from Cage and Perlman, prevented the film from ever creating a dark and horrific tone; and that's exactly what this film needed.

This friggin' book is the cause of a lot of trouble!!

It's choices like adding all the levity into the dialogue and having that pre-credit sequence that completely ruins any mystery that makes me wonder why director Dominic Sena was chosen to helm this one.  Sena's resume includes directing GONE IN SIXTY SECONDS and SWORDFISH, and the closest he's gotten to the genre was with the crap-fest WHITEOUT in 2009.  And unfortunately Sena's lack of genre experience shows like a brightly lit neon sign here; he just wasn't the right choice to direct this film.
And look; this is a big budgeted Hollywood release and as it goes for any movie that's a "period piece", the sets and scenery are crucial to the film successfully transporting us back to whatever time period the film takes place in.  So why, please tell me, does it look like the set designer went to a SyFy Originals' clearance sale for the sets?  We literally have TV movie-grade sets ... very disappointing.

Christopher Lee's 3 minute cameo ... what a waste!!

Then we get to the ending ... that goddamn ending.  I'm not gonna give away any spoilers here so I'm going to use an extended metaphor (at least I think it's a metaphor ... English was never my strong suit):  Let's say you go to your favorite ice cream shop and want a waffle cone of vanilla bean ice cream.  You order and when you get it you find they gave you regular vanilla in a sugar cone.  In a sense there's nothing wrong taste-wise with regular vanilla in a sugar cone, but it's not what you were expecting.  Well everything leading up to the ending of SEASON OF THE WITCH suggests we were gonna get vanilla bean ice cream in a waffle cone, but instead we get regular vanilla in a sugar cone.  It's almost a little insulting that Sena thinks the audience wouldn't mind and be accepting of the "twist" ending.  Does it work?  Yeah sure; why not ... it kinda fits into the film.  But you also kinda feel used by the filmmakers when it's all said and done.  Instead of taking the film in the direction they led us to believe, they thought they were being clever by throwing in a twist; a twist, have you, that really did nothing to actually alter the ending at all.  If the ending was indeed about a witch it could have ended the exact same way as it did  It all just seemed so superfluous!!

The SyFy Channel called ... they want their shitty looking CGI wolf back!!

What's that you ask?  The special f/x?  The CGI is just awful here.  We get some crappy looking CGI wolves and a really craptacular CGI final creature.  Believe me when I say they're not worth mentioning.
Remember in the brilliant 1957 film THE SEVENTH SEAL when the knights are walking in the woods and encounter the "witch" caged up in the horse carriage?  Well when Cage and Perlman first set out on their journey I felt like I was seeing what happened to that girl after Bergman's camera left her.  Unfortunately Sena's camera picked her up and decided to go for the lowest common denominator and give us an ending we've seen a thousand times.  SEASON OF THE WITCH isn't a horrible film and I'm sure it won't even make my Worst of 2011 list, but it's also not a great film.  Save your money; I'm sure it'll be on the SyFy Channel in another month or two!!
My Summary:
Director:  Dominic Sena
Plot:  2 out of 5 stars
Gore:  2 out of 10 skulls
Zombies:  0 out of 5 brains (there were almost zombie-like creatures at the end)
Reviewed by Scott Shoyer