Season Of The Witch

The general feeling about Nicolas Cage movies is that when he’s good, he’s very good and when he’s bad, he’s pretty bad indeed. There seems to have been equal balance for both viewpoints, though recently the latter category has more weight to it, the only exception being Kick-Ass, a film where he was essentially in on a joke he could sink his teeth into.

Season of the Witch is a movie that won’t do his credibility any favours but doesn’t quite give it the last rites either. It turns out to be an inoffensive romp that involves exorcism, redemption, swordplay and, yes, witchcraft.

Cage, reunited with his Gone in Sixty Seconds helmer Dominic Sena, is Behmen, a disenchanted medieval knight back from the crusades and riding alongside his comrade, Felson (Ron Perlman). They keep their distance from a church for which they feel they’ve spilled far too much blood. The church, it seems, doesn’t share that perception and they are recruited to bring a young woman (Claire Foy) - accused of witchcraft - to a monastery to be judged after a nearby village falls foul of the plague.

Cage, who apparently only managed to kill one innocent person during his entire career as a Crusader, remains weary of needless death and isn’t convinced of the nameless waif’s guilt. Of course, before the journey is done, there’s plenty of action, magic and consequences to his decision to find out the truth.

The sort of movie that plays its plot with a straight face but in which you can see the actors are going through the motions, this isn’t terrible in the sense of other recent movies, but it’s clearly by-the-numbers and formulaic. Perhaps comparable with, say, Solomon Kane, but not as derisory as Jonah Hex, it was always destined to be dunked in its cinema-run but will probably do better on this DVD release. It’s all-silly fun, but not quite as spell-checked as it might have been.

7/10