Movie Review: Season of the Witch

Missed a few weeks of blogging again, leaving me with a backlog of Movies to review, The first one is Season of the Witch which I have to admit I have thought about not reviewing as I would much rather get straight into the second review I will be putting up today Black Swan, But if I miss Season of the Witch I am worried I would never come back to it.

I don’t want you to get the impression from this that Season of the Witch is a bad movie (It is, but you should pick that up from the review instead.) To be honest to call it a bad movie would probably be unfair, it was not supposed to be an Oscar winner but coming sandwiched between Oscar favourite The Kings Speech and the very well made Black Swan the inadequacies of this medieval adventure are only too obvious.

The story starts with a demonstration of the persecution of some witches, obviously much to the surprise of the priest carrying out the execution one of them turns out to be a real witch, we then cut to our two heroes (Nick Cage and Ron Pearlman) they are knights in the crusades, which seem to stretch from the Arctic to the Equator as they follow the commands of a clearly insane religious leader, they wake up and realise that they may not be doing gods work and walk away from the army.

This is all essential set up for the actual story which sees the two Heroes disillusioned with the Church finding themselves once again serving them as they escort the witch to a monastery where she can be put on trial for witch craft, there is the usual assortment of escorts along with the two main stars – The Older War Haggard Guard, The Young Inexperienced yet expert Swordsman and the cowardly conman forced to help in return for release from the stocks. The script and storylines are no more original than their choice of companions.

For me this story is made by Ron Pearlman, I should admit that I am a massive Ron Pearlman fan so this was always a bit of a given, but he is great in this film playing the usual “Pearlman” role (The Hard guy who is never endingly loyal.) Cage on the other hand whose acting talent is often unfairly questioned once again plays the same role this could easily be a scene from a flash back in the Sorcerers Apprentice or Ghost Rider the characters are ostensibly the same in each.

All that said the film is not really bad until the end when everything goes very over the top, but if by the time it arrives you are surprised then you really must not have been paying attention.

Sorcerer's Apprentice fails to provide magic

Whilst I was off work last week We attended the Cinema, as it was a special occasion we went to the Cineworld at Brighton Marina instead of the Crawley Branch – I understand if you are intimidated by my champagne lifestyle – Anyway we saw the Sorcerers Apprentice, This film stared Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel in the lead roles with Cage the Sorcerer Balthazar and Baruchel the titular apprentice. The film was basically what you would expect from a Disney film – is it just me or are all films playing very safe and by the numbers at the moment? It again brought home the question of what happened to the image of a cool leading man as Baruchel seems to always be playing a nerd who is lost in the world of “normal” people even whilst he is busy shooting a plasma ball, personally I find it quite an achievement that they can take a guy who is shooting plasma, saving his friend and getting the girl and not make him cool but somehow Disney manage to pull it off. But I guess we just live in the age of the nerd, after all the biggest name in Hollywood at the moment seems to be Robert Pattinson who nobody can say isn’t strange looking.

Anyway the film is saved, as most seem to be these days by Cage who as another experienced Hollywood star plays his part in his usual humoured yet gravely serious way, there is of coarse a homage to fantasia with dancing mops etc… but it is reasonably well done, I would suggest that the main villain of the film is slightly stupid as he tends to feel that having too much help might give him an unfair chance of winning so waits until one helper is dead before calling another (Surely more sensible to build an army.) but I guess if it was not for the stupidity of movie bad guys then good guys would never get to Cages age in the first place.

There were also bit parts for Monica Bellucci (the Matrix Trilogy) and Alice Krige (Borg Queen from Start Trek First Contact) who appear only briefly but in my opinion without cage this film would be showing at 6am on the Disney Chanel in about two months