Season of the Witch
Time Out New York Project: Issue #796, January 13-19, 2011
★★☆☆☆
Dir. Dominic Sena. 2010. PG-13. 113mins. Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, Claire Foy.
The Crusades are raging, and all knights Behmen (Cage) and Felson (Perlman) want to do is dispense with the heathens and head to the pub. Whoever cuts down the lesser number of infidels is buying! Roll your eyes if you will (no, really, roll your eyes — it’s redonkulous), but it’s still quite a witty way to start this unabashedly anachronistic medieval adventure. Cage and Perlman make a splendid, quippy pair (sort of an Old Gothic Riggs and Murtaugh). And director Dominic Sena has a lot of aesthetic fun, using sword-slashing wipes and “yet-another-battle” title cards to show how these mean motherfuckin’ servants of God slowly tire of their calling and go off on their own.
It’s a fun time until the deserters stumble into a plot: A plague is sweeping the land, and the duo is tasked with transporting the witch (Foy) responsible to a remote abbey for trial. They’re accompanied by a ragtag bunch of characters — a naive altar boy, a sleazy merchant, a cagey priest — and have to face all number of challenges, from a raggedy suspension bridge to demonic digital wolves to Ol’ Scratch himself. It’s Centurion Deux without the second-coming-of-Carpenter pretense, though you still wish the trashiness were more distinctive.—Keith Uhlich
