Season Of The Witch

Title: Season Of The Witch (15)

Year: 2011

Running Time: 95 minutes

Director: Dominic Sena

Cast: Nicolas Cage (Behmen), Ron Perlman (Felson), Claire Foy (The Girl)

Notes: Nominated for two awards (both negative).

Rating: 6

Thoughts:   Fourteenth Century knights transport a witch to a monastery where monks believe she is the source of plague.

This all starts very grimly and bleak as a trio of accused witches all get hurled off a bridge to hang them. We have it revealed early that there is indeed a witch.

We then jump in time and place as we join Sir Cage of Yankee-Doodle on Crusade. His and Perlman's accents are so American the credibility is truly stretched as we bounce through a series of short montages of battles.

They all look the same aside from the weather and time of day, and the two main Knights chat away in an annoying fashion (similar to the way Legolas and Gimli chat and count their kills).

A quick reduction in piety, when some civilians are slain, sees them leave the army. It's possible they are running from the wooden acting of the only other person that gets to speak in these exchanges.

They start a quest to get forgiveness for their desertion and finally the film proper starts. There's a lot of preamble. There's a lot of daftness. And there are too many references to things that just weren't in existence.

I know it's not a documentary but it needs some believable context. They assemble a quest group in a suitably cliched way, enough cannon fodder for the forthcoming scenes. Indeed they bring out as many genre cliches as they can find.

It is of course fantasy, but they need us to suspend too much sense of reality. The script is shallow and the story very predictable. Cage ends up not being that bad, fairly hammy but he does at least deliver the very simple lines in a convincing way.

It's filmed to look bleak and that's a bit of a waste of some presumably nice scenery. Add to that the choppy pace, and it's just okay but could easily be better. I really want to like this more.

Oh, and Felson? Jackrabbits are American. You're in Europe. And you haven't heard of America!