THE TRAILERS alone for Season of the Witch made you want to ask for your money back, but longtime fans owed it to Nicolas Cage to see if he could redeem the film. Sadly, no. Cage plays a knight named Behmen whose best pal (Ron Perlman) is the burly Felson; the names sound like a pair of Boston University frat-rats. Behmen and Felson spent the early 1300s putting their swords through Saracens, battles captioned with historic-looking dates and all looking exactly alike. “Ever have the feeling that God has too many enemies?” asks Felson.
Disgusted by hard-PG violence, Behmen and Felson cut and run from the Crusades but end up in a town hit by a deathly plague that leaves everyone looking like motor-oil-drenched Elephant Men. The town’s dying cardinal (Christopher Lee, unrecognizable save for his voice) asks the knights to haul an imprisoned witch (Claire Foy) responsible for the plague to an abbey a week’s ride away. There, the monks know the sacred witch-binding spells necessary to send her back to hell.
She seems like such a nice girl, though, and there’s an element of doubt: what if she’s actually an innocent victim of superstition? This question (soon solved, unfortunately) eclipses the other problem: isn’t it easier to move a book and a couple of monks than a dangerous witch in a huge iron medieval paddy wagon? A few extraneous characters whose fate is quite foreseeable accompany the knights; one, a swindler, played by Stephen Graham, has a New Jersey accent. Thus a fateful trip from the Wormwood Forest to the Abbey of the Zombies.
Director Dominic Sena is a living repository of 1990s film techniques: he has an almost medieval faith that the editing will smooth everything out, as will the wow-factory of digital effects: Wolves! Yes, but with a flick of the pixels, they’re supernatural wolves! Cage, looking quite well fed, takes the knightly high road; the script is littered with lines like “Honor is not to be discarded or forgotten.” The high point is Perelman’s, however: this actor, a living Picasso Minotaur, gives the devil a North London–style head butt.
PG-13; 95 min.
