Young Writers Society

I want to tell you I hate this movie. I want to tell you this movie is the half-wit love child of Lord of the Rings fan-fiction and a skyscraper of excrement. I want to tell you this movie is the equivalent of gargling lava, akin to having Satan vomit a bolus of pain-flecked retardation into the faces of movie-goers the world over. But in good conscience I cannot. This Olympian test of human endurance doesn’t even deserve the effort put into that hyperbole.

Director Dominic Sena (Whiteout) has crafted a film so aggressively dull, so painstakingly tedious that you’d have to wash your sinuses in Drain-O to stop from slipping into a coma in the theater seat. Season of the Witch concerns two wayward knights from the Crusades (Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman) who, after deciding that senselessly murdering people for the Church is a bad thing, decide to take up the more humane vocation of sending a woman to her death on counts of "witchcraft." Had the legitimacy of her charges been left unclear, an interesting dilemma could have been introduced to our protagonists. But any moral quandry is cleared up after the woman turns fire on and off.

Suffice it to say that the movie consists of three equally uninteresting things: Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman engaging in stilted BFF banter, Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman swing swords/staring intently at empty spaces filled with canned CGI spookiness, and the witch (Claire Foy) peering out of her bangs with malicious abandon.

All of this muddled medieval-horror blather was spun into existence by Dominic Sena, an entirely incompetent filmmaker who handles concepts like suspense and character development with all the grace of a spastic sledgehammer. To paint you a picture, characters treat the rapidly spreading black plague like cooties and at one point a medieval priest says, "My God!"

Sena is a company yes man, filming straight from the page with no creative vision or style. He's an apathetic lump of clay, molded into whichever studio-friendly demographic the higher-ups deemed most profitable for that month. In a job sphere fueled by passion and creativity, Dominic Sena’s films are merely paychecks.

Despite all my ranting, the sad truth is that Season of the Witch simply isn’t that bad. If it were, a viewing might be necessary just to revel in its unintentional hilarity, but this waste of celluloid is so inconsequential that your mind will be wandering even as your eyes gaze blankly at the muted PG-13 violence. Walking out the theatre after viewing Season of the Witch is about as close a non-concussed person can get to amnesia.