Season of the Witch

Season of the Witch follows wisecracking 14th-century knights Behman (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman) as they’re forced to escort a suspected witch (Claire Foy) to a monastery, with the journey bringing the troupe, which also includes Ulrich Thomsen’s Eckhart and Stephen Graham’s Hagamar, face-to-face with all manner of danger and peril. Though it eventually morphs into a seriously tedious piece of work, Season of the Witch admittedly gets off to a perfectly watchable, better-than-expected start – as the film opens with a striking pre-credits sequence and immediately segues into Behman and Felson’s entertaining exploits on the battlefield. The palpable chemistry between Cage and Perlman’s respective characters plays an instrumental role in initially cultivating the movie’s passable atmosphere, with filmmaker Dominic Sena offering up what feels like, surprisingly (and impressively), a medieval spin on the buddy comedy. It’s only as the protagonists embark on their episodic excursion that Season of the Witch begins to lose its hold on the viewer, as Sena employs an incongruously deliberate pace that only serves to highlight the uneventfulness of Bragi F. Schut’s screenplay (ie there are simply no standout sequences within the movie’s increasingly interminable midsection). The more action-oriented moments within the proceedings fall uniformly flat (eg the heroes are attacked by fake-looking wolves) and it goes without saying that the special-effects-heavy, hopelessly over-the-top finale falls completely and utterly flat. Cage’s disappointingly subdued performance stands as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, with the end result an entirely underwhelming thriller that’s rarely as engrossing as its setup might have indicated.

*1/2 out of ****