Season of the Witch : Movie Review


So if I tell you that a medieval action-adventure starring Nicolas Cage, directed by the guy who made "Gone in Sixty Seconds" and released in January -- traditional burying ground of cinematic failure -- is kind of trashy and stupid, I'm guessing you're all, like, yawn. I mean, Cage, who seems compulsively unable to turn down a role, playing an overamped tough guy in a bad movie? Surely not! Now, if I add that the movie in question, which is called "Season of the Witch," resembles a Hollywood-by-way-of-Hungary remake of Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" filtered through the B-movie aesthetic of, say, Roger Corman, then maybe I can get your attention for a couple of minutes.

It's a fair description as far as it goes, but that isn't nearly far enough. If anything, director Dominic Sena (best known, beyond directing Cage in "Sixty Seconds," for Janet Jackson and Sting videos) is way too focused on borrowing shots, scenes and situations from the Bergman classic, to no evident purpose, rather than delivering any actual entertainment. Off the top of my head, I'm guessing that "Season of the Witch" claims a place in the top five all-time bizarre and pointless homages to art cinema. (No. 1 on that list, now and for all time, has to be the 2001 slasher flick "Jason X," with its quotations from Tarkovsky's "Solaris.")


See www.salon.com for full review

Author : Andrew O'Hehir