Criminally Underrated: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

I wrote about the weakest (but still delightful) Neveldine/Taylor feature to date, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance for Spectrum Culture's Criminally Underrated series. After vastly overrating The Dark Knight Rises last year and even cooling on my more muted enjoyment of The Avengers, Ghost Rider 2 feels like the best of last year's crop of comic book films (close second: Dredd), and its ingenuity impresses me where the increasing severity of the tentpole super flicks is becoming more facile and stylistically dull.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (Neveldine/Taylor, 2012)

After the gross incompetence of Marvel's first cinematic crack at one of its intriguing lesser-tier characters, I can't imagine anyone was altogether excited for a sequel to 2007's Ghost Rider. The fact that a sequel has come five years after the fact only compounds the general indifference that surely greeted this project. Nevertheless, Marvel outdid themselves in selecting Neveldine/Taylor to replace über-hack Mark Steven Johnson at the helm. The duo behind the frenzied, magnificently obscene Crank films could bring a refreshingly seedy and gonzo approach to this grindhouse-friendly comic book hero, and suddenly the hysterical miscasting of Nicolas Cage in the first movie became a boon. The thought of the craziest filmmakers in America working with the craziest actor in America seemed too good to be true.

Unfortunately, it is. If Marvel was willing to give this franchise another go, they clearly weren't going to invest much in it, and the result is a film that, in many ways, looks less professional and polished than the works Neveldine/Taylor did as underground filmmakers. Given barely any more money than they received for the excellent, criminally underrated Gamer and expected to make a more CGI-intensive film, Neveldine/Taylor must retreat to Romania to shoot, something they themselves mock with a location card vaguely reading "Eastern Europe."

But that's one of the only things the irreverent duo take to task with the film. I was all set for a Grand Guignol travesty of the comic book film, because God knows that's what the genre could use right now. After last year's middling crop of franchise films made for a tepid summer, a full-on genre assault would be more than welcome. And even with the PG-13 rating, I expected a certain amount of chaos and inappropriateness. While there are elements of both, Ghost Rider 2 sadly feels bereft of the anarchic streak of experimentation and almost gleeful offense that categorizes Neveldine/Taylor's output.

It starts off well enough, hysterically bypassing context as Idris Elba interacts with monks (including one played by Tony Head!) and ends up in a shootout to protect a mysterious boy (Fergus Riordan). The duo's usual camera tomfoolery further disorients the audience right off the bat, with such wild shots as an inverted tilt that suddenly morphs into a fast-descending crane shot. When thugs burst in on this medieval castle and start killing monks, everything goes crazy as Elba's character races after the aforementioned lad and his mother (Violante Placido), who does not seem to realize he's trying to help them. Sped up shots and an amusingly prolonged slo-mo bit further mess with the crowd, and Brian De Palma's old stance on the importance of beginnings in throwing audiences off their game is beautifully embodied in these frantic early minutes.

Then, everything slows down. Way down. This is the first movie Neveldine/Taylor have directed without writing, and it shows. Odd lapses in momentum characterize the film, with exposition needlessly weighing down the proceedings at every turn. The basic story takes no time to explain: the boy being fought over at the start, Danny, is the literal spawn of Satan (Ciarán Hinds, replacing Peter Fonda). The Devil, weakening in his corporeal state, needs to transfer his essence into the child to create a new, more powerful body, leading to the end of the world as we know it. Moreau (Elba), a member of a secret Christian brotherhood, recruits the Ghost Rider (Cage) to protect the boy until the prophesied day of the apocalypse passes. If Johnny Blaze does so, Moreau will lift his curse and free him from the pull of his demon spirit.

There. That summary was still somewhat convoluted, but there's everything you need to know. Why, then, does the film suddenly pause after every single action scene to waste another 10 minutes rehashing all this? Even the directors grow weary of all the exposition, occasionally employing their techniques to distract from the plodding nature of the dialogue. Random cutaways to Moreau hanging from a cliff or the Ghost Rider peeing fire and nodding proudly at the camera suggest that the filmmakers' ADD sympathizes with the audience's boredom. Those moments suggest the real Neveldine/Taylor, itching to toy with conventions and dismantle expectations, and the critics who find them misplaced are, I think, wholly missing the point.

The pair also encourage Cage to go hog wild with his dialogue, leading to scenes that prioritize insanity over exposition. The best scene of the film shows Cage intimidating some underworld information broker for the whereabouts of Ray Carrigan (Johnny Whitworth), Nadya's former lover and the henchman hired to abduct Danny. Trying to hold back the Rider from coming out, Cage devolves into tics and jerks as his voice bends and squeals like overheating brakes. It is sublimely ridiculous, and the one part of the whole movie that lives up to the promise of Neveldine/Taylor directing Nicolas Cage.

Sadly, the nature of the Ghost Rider means that every time the actual superhero is on-screen, Cage isn't. Nevertheless, the makeover of the Rider's CGI appearance, though still a bit wonky, is a vast improvement over the laughably bad conceptualization of the first film, where the flaming head looked like it had been taken from abandoned animation from the Doom III video game. This Rider looks grimier, his skull more blackened and his riding gear subtly bubbling from the heat. In the first film, the Rider lumbered like a robot, mechanically forcing penitence onto his victims. Here, the Rider's head darts like a bird's, curious and malevolent as it roars and taunts. The Rider's ability to turn whatever it rides into a flaming conflagration leads to one gloriously OTT sequence at a construction yard, where Javelin missiles are fired directly into the beast's chest to no avail and a massive piece of construction equipment becomes a blazing fireball.

In such moments, Ghost Rider 2 achieves a glorious stupidity that is at least agreeable, even if it doesn't match the defiant tastelessness of Neveldine/Taylor's other work. Cage and Elba have fun being campy, and they make up for the hopelessly dead performances of Riordan and Placido. Hinds, too, is a step up from Fonda's vaguely enticing devil, playing Satan with a weariness that flecks his sinister calm with a desperation that makes him erratic. These players elevate the film, and the directors make it borderline transgressive when they really kick into high gear. Sadly, though, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance too often feels woefully conventional and dispensable. In a recent appearance on the (excellent) podcast How Did This Get Made?, Brian Taylor alluded to him and Neveldine being modern grindhouse filmmakers. That clarifies a great deal of the choices made with this film, with its stripped-down, occasionally gonzo style and frequent narrative halts. But for those of us who see the duo as the heirs apparent to Brian De Palma, merely making C-grade trash feels like a waste of potential for the most revolutionary mainstream stylists in decades.

Capsule Reviews: Trespass, My Week With Marilyn, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Trespass (Joel Schumacher, 2011)

Having premiered at TIFF in September and come to DVD not two months later, Trespass couldn't possibly have been any good, but its badness is still striking. Shot with colors so artlessly exaggerated it looks merely as if someone adjusted the color balance rather than composed anything, Trespass wouldn't be interesting if it were lensed by Emmanuel Lubezki. A bog-standard house thriller with a simperingly moralistic message about family, the film proceeds with hilariously random flashbacks, endless narrative diversions, and hopelessly absurd dialogue. Nicole Kidman still can't get her emotions to match her starched facial expressions, while Nic Cage plays the fast-talking diamond dealer with his usual incoherent yelling. (I confess that his agonized cry of "You shit fucking animals!" is something of a highlight.) The film does improve (by which I mean becomes even worse) when someone socks Cage in the mouth and he speaks with a thick voice the rest of the film. But not even the delight of Cage at his worst can make up from Schumacher's clumsily overactive direction or the constant addition of conflicts thanks to useless reveals.

My Week With Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2011)

When a film summarizes itself with its opening text scrawl, it has to work twice as hard to make the audience care for what is to come. But Simon Curtis' lazy sorta biopic doesn't have an ounce of insight in it, printing the legend and never engaging Monroe on any human level. We get a glossed-over view of her instability, with the brilliant Michelle Williams setting aside her command of elegantly controlled body language to offer up an Oscar-ready performance of big accents and aggressive acting. Kenneth Branagh, however, redeems much of the film's facile approach, giving his finest performance in years as a crotchety, thin-lipped Sir Laurence Olivier, looking for rejuvenation in co-starring with Monroe but discovering only his obsolescence in the process. But he can only overcome so much; Curtis even presents Monroe as an airhead in her private life, taking her to a giant library only to have her rush to a massive dollhouse to ooh and aah. By presenting her as naïve and simple behind closed doors, the director never truly delineates between the real woman and the ass-shaking, pose-striking, kiss-blowing sex symbol who turns on every time the press finds her.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)

We Need to Talk About Kevin has two strong factors in its favor. One is the direction of Lynne Ramsay, who relies on striking, even idiosyncratic visuals and her actors' body language to convey story and emotion while still being lucid enough to not only follow but predict (almost to the film's detriment). The other is Tilda Swinton, who captures the trauma and paranoia of being not merely the witness to but the ultimate target of her child's killing spree, not only scanning her memories to find out where it all went wrong but feeling the hot sting of hostile stares from the community that blames her for her son's rampage. Together, Ramsay and Swinton create a claustrophobic mood wracked with doubt, as even Eva begins to wonder if she truly is at fault.

Where the film falls down is in its handling of Kevin, who upends whatever nature vs. nature debates arise from some of Eva's memories by being so innately evil that comparisons to such films as The Omen and The Bad Seed have cropped up everywhere.. Every child hired to portray the child at various stages has dark, expressionless stares and absent humanity, which makes the occasional glimpse of a slapped hand or a cutting remark from Eva or a violent video game enthusiastically played seem like belated attempts to add a counterbalance. When young Kevin caustically responds to his mother's remark about matching a room to his personality with, "What personality?" he lets on more than he realizes. At times, the film displays the more nuanced tone of the visual assembly that makes Kevin almost compelling, but soon he's back to that lifeless look in his eyes, leaving me wanting more of these complex moments.

Nevertheless, Swinton is so good at finding depth in the only person ever simplified more than the child killer in such situations, and Ramsay's direction is often so compelling despite its occasional obviousness, that We Need to Talk About Kevin emerges one of the finer films of the year. When everything, or even just most things, click, it makes for a haunting study of survivor's guilt that even manages to find hints of redemption amid the bleakness of the red-soaked visuals and Johnny Greenwood's howling score.

Brian De Palma: Snake Eyes

Snake Eyes is, in a bizarre way, the logical continuation of Brian De Palma's previous film, Mission Impossible. Mixing political thriller with questionable plays for De Palma's capacity to capture Romantic grief, Snake Eyes likewise feels like a safe bet for the director, but one he that allows him to push his luck. If it's one of the emptiest films of De Palma's corpus—a collection of work that houses more than a few technical exercises—at least the director gives us a story so ridiculous you almost don't mind when it collapses in the third act.

In a long career of intricate, arresting openings, the start of De Palma's Snake Eyes may be his finest. A 13-minute tracking shot that moves through the grimy politics behind a heavyweight championship fight, the opening moves from camera monitors through police corruption and finally ends with an assassination. I would couch that in a spoiler warning, but I want to avoid repetition and thus see no need to mention that this is a Brian De Palma movie a second time. It's the start of a shallow but merry and hysterically over-intricate journey into late-Clinton America, a time of economic success and almost-grating peace, of a country so well off it's now darkly quaint to think how badly everyone wanted something interesting to happen.

That opening shot serves not only to introduce principal players—chiefly crooked cop Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) and his best friend, Commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise)—but to serve as a smorgasbord of De Palma's pet themes and tricks. The initial focus on pre-newscast prep and pullback to a row of monitors starts the film with surveillance, while Rick's tour through the arena's underbelly, placing bets for the fight and chasing down hoods (Luis Guzman) who hang out with the defending champ, shows off corruption and the way some cops fit into the criminal underworld a little too well. De Palma's Steadicam careens around corners, tilts with anticipation, and when the action moves to the floor of the arena for the big match, De Palma uses the frenzy of the crowd (and a ludicrously oversized and ironic American flag) to instantly plunge into sensory overload. You're left waiting for something terrible to happen, a feeling made worse by De Palma strictly tethering the movement to Rick, always pivoting to look at suspicious people around him and Kevin sitting by the visiting Defense Secretary before returning to an oblivious and ostentatious Rick. At the height of the match, shots ring out, and Rick turns to see the Defense Secretary dying, the only clues amidst the pandemonium the previously established glimpses at surrounding characters. As is so often the case with De Palma, the style slowly reveals the substance.

It's a shame the rest of the film doesn't live up to this bravura opening, a perfectly timed escalation of comic overacting, art-for-art's-sake stylistic flourishes and gripping tension that introduces multiple stories and red herrings from the start. Once Rick, with his gaudy leather-brown jacket and leopard-color Hawaiian shirt, starts digging into a case that runs far deeper than he could ever comprehend, it soon becomes evident that he's too indifferent to justice and too invested in some of the suspects to pursue the truth with the conviction he displays.

Not that it isn't fun to watch Cage strut around yelling his head off at all those who cross him. In many ways, he's the ideal Hollywood star for a De Palma film, capable of powerhouse performances when matched with the right material but incapable of subtlety at all times. Cage is a bundle of wild eyes, a manic grin, and a base volume so high one would be forgiven for assuming Cage imagined himself in some strange variant of Speed where he couldn't drop beneath 55 decibels. The only time he looks in his element is when stands up in his front-row seat and declares himself king as the crowd roars. That is the single moment of the film Cage is sufficiently in his element; the rest of the time, the action takes place on Earth, a place Cage infrequently dwells.

Made to chase down various leads, Rick slowly uncovers a vast conspiracy that does not border on comical so much as merrily squeak a clown nose as it rides over the line on a unicycle. De Palma announces the twist early on, even framing it in blatant visual terms: red light bathes the double-crosser as the camera goes Dutch, and ominous music sets in because you can never have too many clues in a De Palma film. Taking a page from their work on Mission: Impossible, De Palma and writer David Koepp set their sights on a wounded military-industrial complex reacting to the end of the Cold War gravy train with pent-up masculine capitalist aggression. This curious, amusing mash-up of jingoistic greed and psychosexual feelings of impotence in the military machine when it cannot flex its muscles to impress people is grounds for merciless De Palma satire, but the director never truly explored the idea in either of these films.

But if Snake Eyes sacrifices potential depth of comedy (to say nothing of humanity), it at least proves a fun diversion that lets De Palma dance around coquettishly. He and Cage understand each other to the point that the two nearly ring tragedy out of the absurdity of the double-cross and Rick's steadfast refusal to accept it (to those always on-guard for De Palma's purported misogyny, the fact that he blames a woman to her face for the transgressions of a man edges uncomfortably into an abstract, allegorical form of slut-shaming, with money swapped out for sex). Sinise plays Dunne like Lieutenant Dan with more self-control but all of the frothing hatred roiling underneath; to hold back that tension, Sinise clenches his jaw, and it's entirely conceivable he turned in this performance after having his mouth wired shut from some kind of accident. His hissed lines make a jolly counterpoint to Cage's toothy yells. Carla Gugino steals the show as the mysterious woman whose role remains ambiguous for a chunk of the film as she alternates between the femme fatale, the brilliant professional and the damsel. Gugino handles these shifts so fluidly she emerges perhaps too talented a chameleon for the sort of person her character really is, but it's a delight watching her melt through various female types while not letting herself be defined by any of them.

But not even Gugino is as interesting as De Palma's camerawork. Though the film lacks the aesthetic or political bite to place it among the director's finer works, Snake Eyes boasts a few setpieces that display the best (and most gloriously tacky) of De Palma. Besides the stupendous short-film career-summary of the opening shot, De Palma outdoes himself with a drift over hotel rooms as evil forces close in on Cage and Gugino. With a camera pointed straight down, De Palma moves over gauche tableaux of Atlantic City oblivion, scanning over garishly colored rooms filled with reveling frat boys, lonely gamblers, gratified johns, even a businessman or two who clearly imagined themselves enjoying the kind of night we see in the other neon-smeared suites clinging to the '80s by the fake fingernails. As with the first shot, it's silly, tasteless, and oh so brilliant.

Drive Angry

Drive Angry resides in the No Man's Land between ignorant bliss and smug self-awareness, noxious tar pit that slowly sucks down fun premises into a black morass of lazy winking and absolving self-deprecation. However, it is also the first film in a while to successfully navigate its way back and forth through this trap-filled territory. Drive Angry certainly does not work as a subversive take on grindhouse in the vein of Tarantino's Death Proof; it is not even great trash. But it's damn fun, and as soon as I finished watching it the first time I admit I immediately planned a second trip to the theater.

Having managed to avoid nearly everything regarding the film save for its absurd title, I got to experience Drive Angry's slow mounting of story elements with a degree of unknown I never enjoy anymore, not in the age of total media saturation. The opening scene of the film depicts a CGI prison in a red-coated frame. For a second, I did not even recognize it as hell, though the presence of a muscle car tearing out of the place on a bridge also threw me off the trail. I don't recall Virgil mentioning that when he showed Dante the place.

The first 30 minutes of the film veer wildly out of control, jumping any fluid kind of editing with haphazard introductions for the movie's cast list weaving an unnecessarily ornate web for only a handful of characters. I saw the film two times and was still bewildered at the lack of context for the opening barrage of images, from Nicolas Cage chasing down some rednecks with pentagrams marked on their chests to a supremely tarted-up Amber Heard crushing the testicles of her lascivious, greasy diner boss. And just when you've settled down and accepted the absurdity of the situation, along comes William Fichtner in a suit calling himself the "Accountant," always asking if Cage has just come through the area knowing full-well the answer. Those left alive by the stranger's tears through town ask the Accountant who he is and what the man has done, but he deftly avoids any exposition.

By the time pieces start to fall in place and the character name John Milton drops a huge clue for those of us who remember senior-year English, Drive Angry has amassed such an impressive horde of contrivances, loose ends and overall questions about the physical properties of certain items and people that the whole shebang nearly collapses. Then, it acts as if nothing ever happened and finally gets down to the good stuff: blatant, unabashed fetishism of every body part and overcompensating gadget.

Drive Angry knows how dumb it is and occasionally shows its hand to the audience to let us in on its cheek, but the sincere, shameless ogling pervading the film makes for a far funnier and more entertaining ride than the occasional plodding moments of overt self-awareness. Cage, toned down from his most manic work, looks increasingly withdrawn in his roles, as if the weight of his recent manic episodes on-screen, be they good (Bad Lieutenant) or bad (almost all the rest). His rage here is amusingly insular given the wild insanity of his actions, a slow burn of resentment and self-loathing that grounds the film's nonsense in the sort of dramatic seriousness that only makes a film like this funnier. Then again, these days it is not always clear whether or not the self-loathing in a Cage character reflects its actor's own feelings.

However, he looks as if he had fun here, delivering his lines with a halting relish as if he wanted to savor every last morsel of such delicious lines as, "I never disrobe before a gunfight." Milton's story unfolds so ponderously that Cage's seriousness pales in comparison to the pseudo-pathos of his character, but Cage comes out of his gloom with enough dry humor to make the convoluted issue of his daughter being murdered by Satanists (led by a Chris Gaines/Garth Brooks-lookin' Cajun Jim Jones played by Billy Burke) and his granddaughter abducted for sacrifice not as cumbersome as the pile-on of narrative could be. Heard has scant to do save shout terrified or angry responses to Milton's dour carnage, and she does not appear to have put up a fight against the too-loving gaze of the camera, which always finds the time to scan over her rear and zoom in on her eye-shadowed face. It's harder to read what she thinks of her role, as she commits to the half-tough, half-damsel Piper but occasionally gives a glance that suggests she went back to her trailer to chew out her agent.

Even if she had a blast, though, she and Cage combined could not equal the unrelenting glee with which Fichtner, a super-solid character actor, plays his role. Delighting in the mysterious yet inevitable nature of his character's origins and purpose, Fichtner ignores everyone sharing the screen with him, walking around side characters asking the Accountant's repeated questions as he consumes every piece of scenery not nailed down, casually munching cud as the characters' bewilderment perhaps reflects the actors' own. Fichtner is one of my favorite "that guys," and to see him get to let loose in a role that does not so much take advantage of his skills as let the more subtle actor get his chance to mug shamelessly. If Cage hilariously meditates on his lines, Fichtner does not need to think before spewing out some ingenious, unmistakably sinister yet delightfully bizarre threat or insult. As a villain, he is not particularly frightening, but he does not want to be. The Accountant chases down his escaped quarry not out of a need for vengeance nor even a sense of duty (though he does need to "balance the numbers"): he's just having fun playing with Milton.

I would file Drive Angry under "guilty pleasure" but it does something I've been begging dumb movies to do for some time now: it never undercuts its thick-headedness with too many winks, never tries to forgive its exposition (and my GOD is the exposition in this movie ridiculous). Because it does not attempt to pass off its bad moments as knowing jokes, they actually work as comedy, and when the actual madness kicks in, Drive Angry has inventiveness to spare. A shootout featuring Milton still inside a bar waitress is one of the most outlandish sequences in years, and the use of slow-motion for the entire sequence is cleverer than anything in a Zack Snyder movie. I continue to prefer 3D in films that use it for the kitsch gimmick it is, and the flying limbs and slow-motion bullets flying at the audience make for as good a time as the schlock of Piranha 3D. I expected to go into this film to feed my ironic love affair with the bad Nic Cage (I have a completely sincere adoration for the man when he's on his game), and instead I got a perfectly delightful bit of screwball amorality. But I have a soft-spoken for chicken-fried crap; I am, after all, from the South. Also, can we get a buddy cop film starring Nic Cage and Bill Fichtner, please?

Season of the Witch

A recent College Humor video humorously posited the life of Nicolas Cage's agent, a man forced to contend with his client's perennial inability to say "no" to any project in order to keep himself in castles and pyramids. But that sketch, of course, was lighthearted and broad, building the man's outsized grief at being saddled with Cage's willingness to do everything and dilute his brand until the pain reached a frenzy. I like to imagine Cage's agent as a man who expresses his sorrow in the opposite fashion, silently nodding with resignation as his client agrees to be in the latest piece of crap, hanging up the phone and reaching for a home blood pressure kit to test his heart.

He must have had to put a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue when Cage signed onto Season of the Witch, a film that all but begs comparisons to Monty Python and the Holy Grail despite its straight face. As with that legendary comedy, Season moves largely in a series of vignettes vaguely resembling a plot, but where that played into the Pythons' sketch comedy genius, Season merely moves as if caught in the death rattle of the Black Plague, leaking pustules of narrative drying and caking around swollen nodes of plagiarized fantasy tropes. The plague features prominently in Dominic Sena's film, and I found myself in the unexpected position of feeling sorry for a pandemic disease.

Opening with a scene with only the slightest bearing on the rest of the film, Season of the Witch establishes its style -- for want of a better term -- instantly, carving out its identity with disorienting edits, a slew of references to other (and better) movies and an adherence to historical accuracy that could charitably be described as laughable. Three women accused of witchcraft receive the farcical trial afforded to heretical suspects before being chucked off a bridge with ropes around their necks before their corpses are lowered into the river below, hydroponically planting the corpses in such a way that one simply must expect something bad to happen soon (does that then make this the Spring of the Witch?). A priest wishes to read an incantation to ensure the accused witches stay dead, but a knight says that a hanging and drowning were sufficient. In the interest of honesty, I should say I found this a fair and logical assessment. But of course, they should have let that monk read from his blinged-out book, and soon a drowned woman comes back long enough to wreak a bit of havoc before heading...to some other damn movie, apparently.

But don't think about that, 'cause here comes a Crusade montage. Thousands of miles away, Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman), two knights in service to the Church, gleefully hack their way through Saracens and other enemies of God. Whatever statement Sena might have wanted to make about the hypocrisy of religious purity -- and Lord does he want to make that point -- gets swallowed up in the fun he has clumsily staggering through this montage, broken up briefly by a "wait, what?" shot of the two knights reveling in the most minimalistic medieval tavern ever set up on an empty stage before returning immediately to more shots of God's warrior tearing through the Middle East and Southeastern Europe. Unhelpful title cards provide no sense of logical progression -- they seem to go into the Middle East, return to Europe to fight dissident Christians and then back to Smyrna for a bit of Turkish delight.

But then, after years of killing, Behmen accidentally stabs a woman whose protracted death gasp stuns the man into suddenly giving up his ways and returning to England with Felson, only to immediately be recruited once more by a monk who believes the outbreak of bubonic plague in the knights' absence can be attributed to a young woman who has "confessed" to being a witch. A monk, Debelzaq (seriously?), charges the deserters with helping deliver her to trial in some mysterious monastery, the location of which he barely knows. "I serve the Church no more," Behmen intones with solemn finality, about five minutes before he willingly serves the Church again.

And there, after 20 minutes of largely unconnected, gaudy visuals, ends the plot. The rest of Season of the Witch gets by on weak jump scares, poorly choreographed suspense sequences and dialogue so stale you could store it for food on the long journey to the New World, which of course wouldn't be discovered for another century after the timeline of this film but why should I be held to an accurate, linear account of history when no one involved with the film was? Out of context, some lines attain a terrific comedy: one of the women at the beginning about to be hanged pleads innocence for her ointments. "It was just pig fat," she shrieks with wild eyes. "It wasn't witchcraft!" In one scene, Felson undercuts Behmen's religious rants by saying "Keep your souls. I just want a chicken." Behind him is an untended, well-fed dairy cow that could provide drink and meat in much larger quantities. In context, the lines pile up in collisions of exposition, a crisscrossing web of dialogue as self-defeating as the contradictory plots and themes that dialogue attempts to elucidate.

Nothing in this movie fits together, as if someone attempted to complete a single puzzle with the pieces from five or six separate boxes. The only chemistry that exists between Cage and Perlman must be drawn from the juxtaposition of their faces, Cage's giant forehead playing off Perlman's massive, sloping jawline (Perlman's head is so huge that he can make medium shots into de facto close-ups). Perlman, the only decent aspect of the film, brings his one-man, don't-give-a-damn swagger from Hellboy to the role, making him mesmerizing despite his clunky dialogue (nothing but references to food and sex) but solitary, while Nicolas Cage has the look in his eye of a gold digger lying there and thinking of the Lambourgini that's coming his way once the old bastard dies. A veritable "who's that?" fills out the rest of the cast, some of whom are getting their first major international exposure in a manner they will no doubt attempt to hide in the coming years. Oh, but Christopher Lee shows up for a cameo as a dying cardinal with the world's worst zit, inspiring the question, "Is Christopher Lee running out of money?" God damn it, David Cameron, I don't care how bad the economy is; give this man his proper pension. When FDR installed Social Security as a means of protecting the dignity of the elderly, this has to be what he had in mind.

What the hell even happens in this movie? How can a plot so linear and derivative yet so incomprehensible? Everything exists as a storyboarded sequence, though that would imply that enough planning went into the movie that even a connected series of suspense and action scenes might have arisen from pre-production. Season of the Witch moves through so many Tolkien ripoffs that one setpiece impressively manages to plagiarize Minas Tirith and Helm's Deep in one go. They wade around a bit in a forest, engaging in one of the dullest rickety bridge segments I have ever seen, and there is in fact competition for so narrow a scenario. Sena's camera moves with all the precision of a North Korean nuke, though it makes me just as wary: no spatial continuity exists between random close-ups and medium shots that make up all action shots. Even establishing shots don't help, and most long shots appear to move away from the action as if the DP was trying to slink out of the project as surreptitiously as possible. Poor Claire Foy, in her big-screen debut, is forced to oscillate so rapidly between shivering innocent and manipulative, sinister harpy that one could use her performance as a fan.

So jumbled and meaningless is the film that whatever points Sena and writer Bragi F. Schut (who undoubtedly uses the middle initial to distinguish himself among the other Bragi Schuts) might have made are instantly canceled out by a plot contrivance that occurs typically minutes later. Behmen has seen the evil of the Church and both he and another knight (Ulrich Thomsen) know that religious leaders use witch trials to eradicate dissidents and those who don't fit neatly into the Church's vision of the ideal society. Oh, but wait, there actually are witches and demons so some of these hanging/drowning/inexplicably necessary incantations are clearly justified. Ergo, a few holy men might be full of hot air, but the Church itself is founded on a true basis of supernatural connection and some of the most grisly executions in human history are warranted. Likewise, someone finally has the sense to point out the protagonist cannot atone for years of atrocity by saving one pretty girl, but then that's exactly how how Behmen redeems himself.

That's what makes the film's smug tone all the more infuriating. It actually thinks itself clever, gracelessly speaking aloud its perceived subversion before showing another picture entirely. But everyone involved clearly thought they were making something intelligent until the focused looks begin to slack off about halfway through and Cage starts letting his hair do the acting. Sena even had the audacity to cite The Seventh Seal, one of the landmarks of film history, as a key inspiration. One can almost imagine the haughty son of a bitch lounging in an interview, casually taking a pull from a long cigarette and unironically saying, "Well, I felt a certain intuitive bond with witchcraft, because I'm in the business of making magic."

Season of the Witch has that cheap blue-gray glaze that directors like to use to instill a sense of chilly foreboding and despair, but I didn't need color suggestion for this film to make me sad. Compared to the host of oneiric films last year that incorporated dreams and highly subjective filmmaking into corkscrewing narratives, the third-person distance of Season of the Witch should make the movie far more linear, yet the lazy abandon of continuity and thematic development made the film so hard to follow that those series of useless title cards upfront become even more offensive in their inefficiency. We are spared even the glorious overreaction of Nicolas Cage's weirdness, and I feared that the accused witch at the beginning got that pig fat for her ointments by draining that glistening ham that is an unleashed Cage. Too dully self-confident and plodding to work as unintentional humor, Season of the Witch denied me even the thrill of a Nic Cage stinker. I'm giving the film one star, and that's solely for the brief flash of unintentional humor that had me rolling: a freeze-frame on Cage's face that looks as if someone snapped a drunken self-portrait at a Renaissance Fair-themed frat party. It's magnificent: the shot is supposed to move the audience, and I had tears in my eyes, all right.