At least GONE and SWORDFISH featured befuddled anti-action heroes (Nicolas Cage, Hugh Jackman), tasty eye candy (Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry), and juicy supporting characters, as well as outlandishly over-the-top stunts and motorized action sequences.
SEASON OF THE WITCH lacks even those saving graces, with dazed-looking Crusaders, a mostly superfluous supporting cast, and the colossal wasting of appearances by the great Christopher Lee and the oft-outstanding Ulrich Thomsen. And forget about the idea that this might contain horror or supernatural elements; those have been watered down to suit the PG-13 rating in the U.S. and their residue is weak tea, at best.
Really, the only slight motivation to see the film is to catch a glimpse of the talented Claire Foy. She plays a character referred to alternately as "The Girl" and "The Black Witch," and Foy does more with less than anyone else in the picture.
Behmen (Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman) valiantly fight in the Crusades for years until Behmen finds himself killing an apparently innocent woman. Outraged and appalled -- the 14th Century equivalent of "I'm shocked, shocked to find that killing of innocent people is going on in here!" -- Behmen decides he will no longer fight for the Church. He and Felson desert the army and head for home, only to discover that their homeland is suffering from a terrible plague. The Church, as represented by a local Cardinal (Christopher Lee, severely under-utilized) blames it on a young woman called the Black Witch (Claire Foy).
Condemned to death for desertion, and sensing that the Black Witch may be innocent, Behmen agrees to deliver her to a distant monastery for what the Cardinal promises will be a "fair trial." The monks will then perform a ritual to rid the land of her influence, in the hopes that the Black Plague that has descended upon Europe in the 14th Century will cease, once justice has been dispensed.
Joining the journey are a priest named Debelzaq (Stephen Campbell Moore), a knight named Eckhart (Ulrich Thomsen), a swindler named Hagamar (Stephen Graham), and an earnest young man named Kay (Robert Sheehan). None of them are anything but cannon fodder, playing no important role in the narrative and doing nothing but padding the running time.
You can't help but feel that the film might have been stronger if Behmen and Felson had taken the girl alone, battling the elements and her occasional manifestations of supernatural power. The Black Witch, in the person of Claire Foy, has the potential of being a great character, for which Foy, with her penetrating yet misleading eyes, facial expressions, and body language, seems fully up to the task. Maybe boiling the team down to a trio would have upped the stakes for survival and allowed Cage and Perlman to develop some chemistry between their characters, two men who are supposedly best friends.
Instead, the accused witch is kept in a cage while the others trudge along "protecting" her, tackling the most hackneyed of perils -- a rickety bridge over a deep gorge, wolves in a forest -- with no panache. It's only in the film's penultimate sequence that we finally get a taste of the kind of out-sized silliness that might have made the journey a grand adventure rather than a tiresome slog, with only the occasional wisecrack to relieve the tedium (including a huge, anachronistic groaner near the end).
Sena, who once upon a time made KALIFORNIA, a ragged yet intermittently interesting serial-killer flick, might have brought the project in on time and under budget, and worked well with Cage, but he brings absolutely nothing interesting to SEASON OF THE WITCH, either visually, in the uneven pacing, or in the sometimes snore-inducing performances.
As already mentioned, Claire Foy is the sole bright spot in this bleak mess. Here's hoping she gets an opportunity to shine in another, better movie, and that Nicolas Cage gets more intense and crazy soon -- because earnest and sincere don't cut it for action heroes.