'Season of the Witch' review: Direct-to-video execution snares Nicolas Cage

"Season of the Witch" is a lost cause, and a terrible way to start out the 2011 film year.  Publicity for the movie started in early 2010, but then the posters quietly disappeared from theater walls.  Whether it was re-tooled through editing or reshoots doesn't really matter.  The final product feels like it was delivered by a first-time director, not Dominic Sena, whose first film was the excellent "Kalifornia."

At least Christopher Lee has only one scene in the film, and since his character is stricken with the plague his makeup disguise may be enough for moviegoers to forget he was a part of this mess.  Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman are front and center, so much so that in an opening sequence with a computer-generated army of hundreds of thousands they stand in the very front, the only ones with their helmets off.  Cage and Perlman are left to slosh their way through bland dialogue that feels like it belongs in an eighties' buddy-cop comedy.  After the leader of the army gives his speech, stone-faced, the first lines out of the pair's mouths are about a wager:  whoever kills the least amount of men has to buy drinks that evening.

After slaughtering women and children, Behmen(Cage) and Felson(Perlman) no longer feel like they are doing God's work, and desert the army.  As they journey away from the battlegrounds, they come across a town stricken by the plague.  The church feels that the plague was caused by a witch, and they don't have to do much convincing to get Behmen and Felson to agree to take the suspected girl to the monks for trial.

The girl/witch character is far too ambiguous to ever seem remotely scary.  One moment the girl is afraid for her life, the next she is smiling and laughing menacingly.  Most of the supporting actor work is so poor that at one point it misleads the audience.  The viewer watches the sequence, and for a moment it feels like a twist in the plot.  But the film progresses, and nothing ever comes of the so-called twist.  It's a bad thing when really poor acting is mistaken for a character trying to cover something up.

The film barely cracks the ninety-minute mark, so it begs the question of whether or not it was trimmed down from its original running time.  There is no character development whatsoever, so the viewer knows as much about these characters as they did when the film started.  The action consists of nothing more than up-close hyper-speed sword combat, and for men who consistently laughed on the battlefield it's funny to watch them run away from wolves.  Perhaps the film became too expensive to not release when Nicolas Cage came aboard, because "Season of the Witch" still wasn't ready for the big screen when it was released.  It's a concept that just never comes together, despite competent acting leads and a competent director.

"Season of the Witch" is playing at theaters throughout McHenry County now, but is fading fast and should be out of most by Friday.