Season of the Witch

Here's a surprise: I didn't hate Season of the Witch, one of the latest examples of the career doldrums of Nicolas Cage. This movie received only a 7 percent positive score from Rotten Tomatoes, but compared to The Sorceror's Apprentice it's a masterpiece. I might have given it some good will because I think it was a good idea for a film, and if a hack like Dominic Sena hadn't been at the helm might have been pretty decent. It also pleases me that everyone I think of the title the old Donovan song of the same name pops into my head.

Cage and Ron Perlman star as two crusaders who are seen in many battles, fighting the Arab infidels for God. After a battle in which women and children are killed, Cage and Perlman desert, and start walking home (presumably to Germany, although it's isn't clear). In the town of Marburg, which has been ravaged by the plague, they are offered clemency in exchange for escorting a young woman who has been accused of being a witch to an abbey, where she will be rendered powerless by some chants from the Key of Solomon.

In a familiar template, Cage, Perlman and a few others escort the woman (Claire Foy), who is caged, across forbidding territory. Of course a few will be picked off along the way, and we wonder whether Foy is actually a witch or not (thousands and thousands of women were executed as witches in Europe, so it wasn't a small problem--of course witchcraft really had nothing to do with it). The climax, while over-heated, was satisfactory.

Where the film suffers is a jokey script (I couldn't believe a film set in the 1300s would have the line, "We're going to need more holy water") and a terrible performance by Cage, who again seems like he wants to be anywhere but where he is. Sena seems to want it both ways--a film that is authentic to the period, but that provides anachronistic laughs. The end result plays like a bunch of middle-aged employees from Medieval Times.

And that's too bad, because somewhere in there was the germ of a good film. It just didn't have the necessary personnel to make it happen.