Review: Season of the Witch

Watching Season of the Witch, one wonders how it ever got green-lit in the first place. With a reported $40 million budget on the line, one can only assume that the film’s existence is either the product either of a personal favor or a studio head’s disturbed belief that the American public’s stupidity is bottomless. Its problems began long before any director or actor entered the equation — they had to have been imminently detectable in the first pages of the script. The characters in Season of the Witch deliver dialogue that is so under-researched and grandiosely wordy, in a shoddy attempt to realize the Medieval setting, that it sounds as though it is part of a Monty Python sketch, not a serious piece of historical-fiction.

While the movie’s innate awfulness makes its success in reaching the marketplace something of a miracle, it doesn’t detract from the enjoyment-quotient one bit. In fact, once you get past the way people talk–“What madness is this!”–you probably won’t even think to laugh at the movie. Instead, it becomes unintentionally respectable because it shows a rare conviction for material that is so transparently bad. Other misfires usually fall into one of two categories: A) they realize their faults but don’t care because they are merely designed to make money (think Friedberg/Seltzer) or, more often, B) they could have been great, but suffer from poor execution. But not Season of the Witch — anybody with sense could have realized that no good could come from Bragi F. Schut’s screenplay, but clearly director Dominic Sena, stars Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman, and everybody else involved was nonsensical. And they do their damnedest to bring the gobbledygook to life.

The result is a film that is endearing in its irony. Sena, Cage, and Perlman aren’t exactly filmmaking wunderkinds–some feel the director doesn’t have a single good movie under his belt–but they sure turn lemons into lemonade. Cage and Perlman’s epic warriors Behmen and Felson are never fleshed out, even to lazy buddy-cop standards, but the actors’ interplay conveys a sense of brotherhood that makes them a likable pair, worthy of investing in. (This is no small feat, either, because said interplay mostly consists of the aforementioned dialogue.) Some will undoubtedly criticize the duo (particularly Cage) for their stoic, monotone delivery, but I found this fitting to the characters. Behind the camera, Sena takes cliche set-pieces like the unsteady rope-bridge and infuses them with a boyish sense of adventure that taps into why they were originally effective. The movie was also shot rather well given its budget (modest for an action flick) by Amir M. Mokri, who gives the drab landscapes of Austria and Hungary as loving a treatment as possible.

The one passage in which the cast and crew don’t quite overcome the source is the finale. Up to this point, Season of the Witch is essentially the Plague era’s version of a road movie, with Behman, Felson, and comrades transporting an accused witch by horseback to the town of Severac, where her evil powers will be eradicated by a fabled Christian text. But when they finally discover that the witch is not all she seems–surprise!–the script calls for some über-ridiculous CGI. By this point, however, most viewers will have submitted to the movie’s silliness enough that it is fun to play along with such a go-for-broke ending. While Season of the Witch becomes a sufficient entertainment, it isn’t good enough to make anybody care if it self-destructs at the last minute. Quite the opposite, actually — as heavy-handed voiceover narration poured out of the speakers over the final landscape shot, I was eternally grateful that on the dreaded cinematic dumping-ground that is the first weekend of January, I had fun watching a bad movie rather than suffering through one.

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Season of the Witch (2011, USA). Produced by Steve Alexander, Alex Gartner, Alan Glazer, Tom Karnowski, Ryan Kavanaugh, Charles Roven, and Tucker Tooley. Directed by Dominic Sena. Written for the screen by Bragi F. Schut. Starring Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, Stephen Campbell Moore, Stephen Graham, Ulrich Thomsen, and Claire Foy. Distributed by Relativity Media. Rated PG-13, with a running time of 95 minutes.