Season Of The Witch Review

Nicolas Cage recently admitted he’s always wanted to be a knight, ever since the age of five. Well, it looks like he got his wish, chain mail, Crusades and all, in Season of the Witch, which is a curious mix of supernatural horror and historical period drama, with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from one of Cage’s own personal screen heroes, Christopher Lee, all lumpy and bumpy from the Plague.

The film choice is hardly anything out of the ordinary or taxing for the ‘Prince of Supernatural’, Cage, who likes to dabble in the magical and unexplained and has done so in many of his previous projects, most recently The Sorcerer’s Apprentice for Disney. Sadly Dominic Sena’s film never seems to fully amount to anything on the grand scale that you would expect from a Crusading adventure involving a witch who is blamed for the spread of the Black Plague and a dollop of demonic presence.
It’s a shame, considering it has a compelling beginning as some old hags get tried and dunked for dabbling in the dark arts and the stage is fully set for a fun and boisterous adventure between two comrades-in-arms, Behmen (Cage) and Felson, played by Hellboy himself, Ron Perlman. The two are seen slaying the un-Christian masses abroad, before stopping to think about their actions and getting an attack of conscience, then going AWOL to get away from the clutches of the 14th Century church. It’s an ideal screen pairing that works a treat with Cage’s sensitivity verses Perlman’s oafish presence. There are also some truly humorous moments, mainly due to Perlman’s Felson teaching a naïve knight wannabe a thing or two about survival. As a Cage-Perlman show, it ticks all the boxes, but it just isn’t enough to bring it out of mediocrity.