Oh...My...God!!!!!!  What happened here?  I'm sure we all heard the horrendous reviews, but I honestly thought they had to be exaggerated.  They weren't.

OK, first the facts - $40 Million budget, horrendous $25 Million NABO, surprising $67 Million Over Seas, totaling out at $88 Million WW...way more than this turkey deserved.

Written by the guy who wrote the TV show Threshold, and directed by Dominic Sena, who gave us one of the biggest losers in recent history, Whiteout, this thing is just a miss on every level.

Not really even sure where to begin, but I'll just throw out some of the miscues as they come to me...

The story itself is just downright stupid, dull, and small minded.  It plays out like an 80's linear video game.

I actually like both Nic Cage and Ron Perlman, but they're both so miscast here, it's humorous.  And the funny thing is that much of the film seems to imply that they were going for comedy for some foolish reason.  Cage is 47 and Perlman is 61.  These are not actors that look the part of unstoppable knights who have killed literally 1,000's in battle, and never seem to even get a scratch.

Although the opening is alright (and actually one of the few highlights), it also doesn't have alot to do with the whole film.  We start with some accused witches, then we jump years into the future to several different battles scenes (again, each one, years apart, as shown with SUPERS).  It's really just a mess the more I think about it.

FX/CGI - TERRIBLE!  Pitiful!  Shockingly bad in many instances.  What were they thinking?

Dialogue -     Seriously, unreal.  A new level of pathetic. And to make matters worse, there's alot of it!  Cage & Perlman's characters actually make jokes about who's going to have to buy drinks after the battle, based on who kills more people.

Tone/MPAA Rating - I'm gonna lump this together.  It's one of the single biggest flaws here and something that shouldn't have been an issue.  The film was released with a PG 13 rating and played out like comedy or spoof at many times.  At others, however, it seemed like horror, and there was a dark undercurrent of death running through most of it.  This should have been an R rated, serious horror movie.  No question about it.

I remember hearing about this when it first went into production and word of mouth was great. It was supposed to be scary, graphic, and a different take.  Somewhere along the way, something happened to change things up, cause the positive buzz started to disappear.

What we were left with is a frickin' abomination.  I just don't understand who the intended audience is. It's terrible, but it doesn't qualify as so bad it's good, so IMO, there's literally no reason to waste 2 hours on it.

The movie was shelved for the better part of two years before release.
After re-shoots, they dumped it into the theatrical wasteland known as January.

I like the premise of whether or not persecuting the witch is justified.
The potential for mystery interested me, but they blew the lid on that in a hurry.

Cage's character named Beeman, didn't help.
I kept thinking about The Wicker Man, "Not the bees!"

E.D.

I didn't find movie terrible but I also didn't find it memorable.  I watched it a while ago and remember very little about.  I do remember thinking it would have been better served by different casting - British casting in particular.  American Crusaders are what didn't work in my book.  

I finally caught up to this film a few weeks ago, and just found the thread. I found the film to be hokey, wondering what the beginning was all about (it was a good setup, to be fair) and I stopped watching just shortly after they escaped The Deadly Bridge Crossing...

And said to myself, y'know...Black Death was far better than this garbage.

Didn't see it, and don't plan to, as Nic Cage attempting to ape a medieval Brit accent would just be too much to bear.  But this script was a Nicholls' Fellowship winner a few years back.  Not sure how badly they mangled the script or if it was already this bad.  Guess it doesn't matter now.  And that friggin' title.  Everyone knows Season of the Witch belongs to Halloween 3, a much earlier crappier movie.  Six more days to Halloween, Silver Shamrock!

You're in luck, Ryan.  Cage didn't attempt an accent in this film.

I got the impression that rewrites ruined this film.  It started out nicely and seemed fairly historically accurate... and then Hollywood crept in and pushed history aside for dramatic purposes.  I'd like to read the original script.


Phil

I'd agree about rewrites, Phil.  I actually thought there were some interesting elements in the film early on that eventually were pushed aside in favour of...I don't know.  Whatever the hell was going on in that film.  For instance, as Brett says, the core question of whether or not the witch was guilty was interesting until it disappeared immediately.

I'm an enormous fan of Nicolas Cage, but this one's about as tough to get through as anything this side of Ghost Rider.

Quoted from Ryan1 But this script was a Nicholls' Fellowship winner a few years back.

You mean ten years ago, don't you? That's when Bragi F. Schut put his spec on the market. During development they had to 'tone down the violence' for a wider audience, so it's quite possible the script got watered down. The film was given a PG-13 rating, the studio edited more in hopes for a PG, but got the same rating. This was one of the causes for the film's delayed release.

Schut won Nicoll back in 2003 with this script....er...the original script anyway.
I found this...

Witch shows folks that even a great script can, almost 14 years later can be produced into a pile of cowdung. Hopefully, Schut got paid. He got raped, yes, but he got paid.
Least I think he got paid.

Just because a script wins the Nicolls or any other comp, doesn't mean it's a great or even good script.

Just because a script gets optioned or made into a film, doesn't mean it's a good script.

What it all means is what I've been saying for years - the people who are in charge don't know a good script from a heaping pile of cow dung.