Assassin's Creed (2016)

Assassin's Creed (2016)

Movie Rating 8.5/10

Director: Justin Kurzel

Writers: Michael Lesslie (screenplay), Adam Cooper (screenplay) | 1 more credit »

Stars: Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons

Storyline

Through a revolutionary technology that unlocks his genetic memories, Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) experiences the adventures of his ancestor, Aguilar, in 15th Century Spain. Callum discovers he is descended from a mysterious secret society, the Assassins, and amasses incredible knowledge and skills to take on the oppressive and powerful Templar organization in the present day

PG-13 | 1h 55min | Action, Adventure, Fantasy

Read imdb review here

Videogame pic 'Assassin's Creed' is anything but fun

In "Assassin's Creed " a death row inmate is saved by a shadowy organization because they need him to unlock the memories of his 15th century ancestor Aguilar to find the location of an apple that contains the genetic code to free will because Marion Cotillard wants to end violence ... or something. There have surely been sillier film premises, but even in a year that gave us "Independence Day: Resurgence," I'm hard pressed to think of anything as convoluted and, in the end, as joyless and unrewarding as this.

Yes, "Assassin's Creed" is attempting to give a serious narrative origin story to the popular video game, ostensibly setting up interest in possible future films. But it's hard to even feign interest in this one, let alone what might come next. Director Justin Kurzel's film embodies the worst tendencies of modern blockbusters to feel not like a full movie, but a tease for what's to come — a television pilot on the big screen. It's become the de facto operating mode for franchise storytelling where instead of relying on a natural interest, the studios force audiences to want more by simply not giving them a full story in the first place.

In the case of "Assassin's Creed," they try to give an emotional entryway into understanding the ancient conflict between the Templars, who want order, and the Assassins, who have sworn to preserve free will at all costs, through the story of Cal Lynch. We meet Cal as a kid — a daredevil troublemaker who bikes home to find Patsy Cline's "Crazy" blaring over the speakers and his mother dead at the kitchen table. His father, sporting a dramatic hooded cape, is there with a knife and tells Cal that he needs to get out and "live in the shadows." Then some government types in black SUVs storm the house as Cal escapes on the rooftops.

Did his dad kill his mom? Was he trying to protect Cal? Does any of it make a bit of sense having never met any of these characters before? And what was with that cape? The answers sort of come, but not for a while. By that point you may have forgotten that you were supposed to care in the first place. The next time we meet up with Cal, he's grown into Michael Fassbender and is on death row for murder (also left largely unexplored). His last words are that he'll see his dad in hell, but, then he wakes up in an operating room where Sofia (Cotillard) explains to him that her company faked his death and now he's going to work for her and her father (Jeremy Irons) but that he's definitely not their prisoner. Cal, sensing probably that too many "you're not a prisoner" declarations probably means the opposite, attempts to escape anyway, in the first of at least three unintentionally hilarious slow mo sequences, but to no avail. They soon hook him up to an insane contraption called the animus that takes Cal back to 1492 Spain — basically into a video game — where he and his fellow Assassins hunt down this Apple of Eden.

It's all so relentlessly dumb and confusing. Among its other sins, like three scenes in a row ending with Cal saying that he's hungry, somehow three screenwriters decided that phrases like "you turn to violence, I turn to science" were really the best they had. Even the visuals lack flair — surprising since Kurzel turned in the stylish "Macbeth" last year with Fassbender and Cotillard. In the end, the real mystery has little to do with the Assassins, the Templars or the Apple of Eden and more to do with why so many talented thespians thought this was a good idea.

Read full review at Daily Mail

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Peter Bradshaw

Movie rating ★☆☆☆☆

 Michael Fassbender game movie achieves transcendental boredom

This film adaptation of the successful videogame, in which Fassbender must battle Templars after the original apple from Eden, is an interminable, lifeless mess

What the fuck is going on?” mutters Michael Fassbender’s character through clenched teeth, reasonably early on in the course of this interminable film, based on the lucrative video game series Assassin’s Creed. You can imagine each of its stars – Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Essie Davis – saying much the same thing while looking through the script, before being directed to the fee on the last page of their contract. It’s an action movie, with dollops of thriller and splodges of Dan Brown conspiracy; and hardly five minutes go by without someone in a monk’s outfit doing a bit of sub-parkour jumping from the roof of one building to another. And yet it is at all times mysteriously, transcendentally boring.

I bet playing the game is much more exciting. But then getting Fassbender to slap a coat of Dulux on the wall of his hi-tech prison cell and monitoring the progressive moisture-loss would be more exciting.

The idea is that Fassbender plays Cal Lynch, a criminal tearaway who is about to be executed for murder by lethal injection. But he is spirited away by a creepy corporation called Abstergo Industries with links to the government, and forced to be a human lab rat. And why? Well it’s obvious. This organisation has discovered that Cal is the descendant of one Aguilar de Nerha, member of a secret brotherhood of warrior assassins in 15th-century Spain, dedicated to battling the tyrannical Templar Order, and rescuing and protecting the original Apple of Eden, which contains the seeds of man’s first disobedience and is therefore the crucible of man’s free will.

The Abstergo organisation’s leaders – glassy-eyed Sofia (Marion Cotillard) and her cadaverous, creepy, polo-neck-wearing dad Rikkin (Jeremy Irons) – want to use a VR machine to get Cal to regress to his 15th-century street-fighting, building-jumping self, ostensibly to research into violence. But could it be that they themselves are secret Templars who want to use him to track down that all-important but strangely dull Apple of Eden?

Theological pedants might grumble that the point about the Apple is that it no longer exists because it was eaten. At the very most, it can only exist in a half-munched form, surely? But this is very far from being the point. Cal is going to be plugged into this machine, with its occult “animus” component, to transfer his soul back in time for some brawling and stabbing and cowl-wearing. Marion Cotillard says in her doom-laden accent: “Prepare the animus”; and it sounds worryingly like “Prepare the enemas”.

There is no animus in this film, however. It’s rare to see a film quite so lacking in animus. It exists only to gouge money out of gamers. They might well want to stick to the game.

 Read full review at The Guardian

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It's Less Fun Than Watching Someone Play A Bad Video Game

It is a tired cliché to say that a bad video game movie is akin to watching someone else play a bad video game. But Assassin’s Creed takes that trope to the next level. Thanks to a plot device that turns a relatively simple premise into an “spend the whole movie explaining the rules” set-up, this movie is akin to watching someone else watch someone else play a bad video game. That extra layer of detachment creates copious layers of disinterest, rendering what could have been a passable action fantasy into a laughably bad botch.

It is rare to see a movie like Assassin’s Creed trip over itself by focusing on all the wrong elements. If I told you that the movie was about a member of an assassination cult in 1400’s Spain who ran around on roof tops and engaged in all kinds of lethal stunt work to procure an important item, you’d probably say “Hey, that doesn’t sound so bad!” But, the movie, which I assume is faithful to the game on which it is based, creates a secondary layer of storytelling which sucks any interest out of the proceedings by focusing on the sizzle rather than the steak.

Read full review at Forbes

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 Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆

Where smart ideas come to die  

 This film has perhaps the most well-cast video-game movie ever. Unfortunately, the script, performances or dialogues cannot keep pace.   

There is something to be said about a movie plot where a creed linked to the “heretics” a.k.a Arabs, living in the new Christian order being established by the Templars, is the keeper of mankind’s “free will”. This Assassin’s Creed comes to humanity’s rescue against the Templars, who believe man doesn’t want civil liberties anymore, but personal conveniences and that freedom has never been less desired by the world.

However, don’t get your hopes up. That’s where all those interesting ideas stop and a film looking to cash in on a successful video game franchise and to launching one of its own, takes over. Science is roped in to search for the ‘Apple of Eden’, as it holds the clues to “man’s first disobedience”. A serious scientist always dressed in warm turtlenecks, Alan Raikkin (Jeremy Irons), and his even more serious scientist daughter always in open-necked comfortable greys, Sophia (Marion Cotillard), believe that the apple holds the answers to ending aggression, and “curing people of violence”. That the money for this exercise comes from the Templars, whose members go dressed about in cloaks and hoods, doesn’t raise any suspicion in Sophia, though she apparently has her concerns.

Callum (Michael Fassbender) is among those violent sorts who has been roped in for their experiments by the Raikkins. Apparently, all people indulging in murders and such like could also belong to the Assassin’s Creed and hence be genetically tapped into for clues to their ancestors — via a Transformer-like machine invented by Sophia that is optimistically called Animus. One of those ancestors could then presumably lead to the apple. In Callum, they hit jackpot as his ancestor was Aguilar, who in 1492, during the Spanish Inquisitions, is believed to have last had the apple. Callum falls into the Raikkins’ hands after being officially executed by the authorities for a murder.

Assassin’s Creed shuffles back and forth between the sepia-hued, dust-covered, and the guilt-free video-game inspired universe of Spain of the 15th century, and modern-day Madrid which we see nothing of except the concrete behemoth that the Raikkins run. At their ‘Abstergo Foundation’, the inmates hear constant messages over the public address system such as “progress is sacrifice”, “in quality, there is peace”, while men in black holding batons guard locked doors. You get the picture.

There are a few moments where Callum questions Abstergo’s methods “towards world peace”, given how people like him are used and discarded – though well fed, as the film curiously takes a pause to emphasise – but these are never taken to any serious conclusion. The film seems to believe that having men and women stand around in contemplative silence looking at glass walls is enough by way of intellectual curiosity. Is that the price Irons, Rampling and even a swiftly discarded Brendan Gleeson demanded for lending their thespian heft to the venture?

The fighting scenes can be impressive though, and one shot of Aguilar and his equally competent fellow-‘assassin’, a beautiful woman who never gets a name, traipsing over clotheslines while ducking deadly arrows must make even God smile, at how humankind believes He works.

The dialogues can be funny. Just watch how Sophia exclaims, in a quiet whisper, always through perfectly painted red lips, “Leap of faith!”. To be clear, Aguilar has just jumped into water, which he does a lot of, none of which evinces a similar exclamation from Sophia. But then, at the other end of that particular jump lies “Christopher Columbus”. Yes, that’s right. Finally, a Spaniard of 15th century we know, heading out you know for the New World, or if you like, the ‘free world’.

And, here is another “fact”. Addressing what suspiciously looks like the United Nations, Alan Raikkin puts “the economic impact of anti-social behaviour last year” at “9 trillion dollars”. Know a few people who could do with such convenient economics?

 Read full review at Indian Express

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Movie Rating ★☆☆☆☆

 This game should have stayed put

The Assassin’s Creed is yet another unsatisfactory film based on a popular video game

There’s a long history of video games being made into films. We’ve had everything from Prince of Persia to Lara Croft, and more recently Warcraft.

However, the one thing they all have in common is their inability to recreate the magic of their original game series. Perhaps this was due to polarised views of the game developers and the actual filmmakers. In a welcome move, video game publisher Ubisoft’s film division, Ubisoft Motion Pictures, decided to enter the arena with the live-action feature Assassin’s Creed. Based on the eponymous game, the film is the first time a publisher is involved in the making of a video game film. Naturally, expectations were high, especially when stars such as Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard were announced as leads.

Unfortunately, the film has done little to take forward the game series’ legacy. Instead of having the game’s actual protagonist Desmond Miles in the film, Ubisoft sought to create an entirely new character named Callum Lynch (Fassbender) to tell the audience of the conflict between the Knights Templar and the Assassin’s Creed.

The premise of the film is pretty much the same as the game. Its execution, however, lacks the finesse, intrigue and excitement the series is renowned for. Indeed, the plot is perhaps too complex to be reimagined within the span of a couple of hours. The characters arcs are too complicated, often left unexplained. For instance, Aguilar’s lover and partner Maria (Ariane Labed) is barely introduced. She just pops up, and a kiss shared between the two is a moment of realisation for the audience. Then there’s the recreation of the Assassin’s Creed universe — which includes the world of the Spanish Inquisition — where director Justin Kurzel (famous for his previous collaboration with Cotillard and Fassbender in 2015’s Macbeth) makes a few amateur mistakes.

For one, his constant back and forth between present-day Lynch (in the Animus macine) and his embodiment of Aguilar is very jarring. We don’t get to enjoy the old-world combat sequences that make the game thrilling. And when we return to Lynch strapped into the Animus, we’re yearning to return to Aguilar’s world. With barely enough time to explain the plot, Kurzel in the end resorts to oversimplifying the principles that the game is much loved for. For instance, rather than explain what the game’s famous Leap of Faith manoeuvre, the director has Abstergo Industries’s head scientist Sophia Rikkin (an absolutely wasted Cotillard) merely mouth the words.

There’s plenty wrong with Assassin’s Creed and very little that’s right. Fans of the game will perhaps be happy with the recreation of their favourite characters on the big screen. But that’s about it. The uninitiated, though, will walk away confused. You’ve been warned.

Read full review at The Hindu

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It’s Shirtless Fassbender vs. Catholics in Assassin’s Creed  

And yet, even that isn't enough to save this time-traveling video game adaptation  

The true power of the Catholic Church can never be adequately measured. Had Jesus not anointed Peter the first Pope, there would be no Dan Brown novels, no Pedro Almodóvar movies, no tartan mini-skirt school uniforms. And there would be no Assassin’s Creed video game. No Assassin’s Creed novels. No Assassin’s Creed movie. That would mean one less opportunity to see Michael Fassbender shirtless. Our world would be a dark one.

Assassin’s Creed the movie is fairly innocuous. It’s also cheerless and dumb. The plot of Assassin’s Creed is very confusing. No, scratch that: It’s a mess. You might not really care, but the movie—directed by Justin Kurzel, the Australian director whose last picture was a supergritty version of Macbeth, also starring Fassbender and Cotillard—is rife with squandered opportunities. At one point, some sort of 15th century enemy Knight scrambles along a rooftop on his horse. This is fascinating: A horse on a rooftop! How did he get there? How did he get down? These are questions the movie never answers. Cool image, though. There are other flaws: When Fassbender as Callum is shirtless, Assassin’s Creed at least nods in the direction of camp juiciness. But in the Aguilar sequences, Fassbender wears a robe of suitably penitential rough cloth, befitting the character’s seriousness of purpose. Yawn.

The 15th Century wasn’t a great time to be alive, and it’s not even such nice place to visit. We went all the way back in time with Assassin’s Creed and all we got was this lousy apple. It’s not even a real one.

 Read full review at Time

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Assassin’s Creed suffers from a ridiculous plot and dreadful script, making it 2017’s first blockbuster stinker  

ASSASSIN’S Creed tries to succeed where other games-to-movies has failed… and fails miserably.

Scientists have discovered a way of harnessing long dead people’s memories by unlocking the DNA found in their descendants.

Convicted criminal Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) is given the ability to experience the adventures of his distant assassin relative Aguilar (Russell Brand dressed as the Sheriff of Nottingham) in 15th Century Spain.

The mysterious Abstergo Industries, run by the Rikkin family (Jeremy Irons and Marion Cotillard), have ulterior motives behind this offer of a second chance, namely locating a mysterious object called the Eden’s Apple.

This (and I’m not even joking), contains some sort of cure to world violence. Uh Huh. Oh, and the company are also involved in the Knights of the Templars.

Brace yourself, it goes on like this for quite some time.

So in order to revert back to the Assassin back in 1492, Cal is attached to what looks like a giant fairground claw and is given an epidural.

He’s then suspended in the air, seeing visions of the past and, not that it’s ever explained, is able to completely interact with these memories.

As if that wasn’t enough, as the film progresses, other patients in the facility join in despite not actually being attached to “Oooo The Claw”.

It is extremely confusing and frustrating. Profound statements like “Violence is a disease – just like cancer” are uttered by people paid to keep a straight face, who do little else than put their hoods up, stand on rooftops long enough for people to see where they are before then deciding to run away.

 Read full review at The sun

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The year 2016 has been full of surprises, so in some ways Assassin's Creed, Hollywood's latest attempt to mine gold from an industry that rakes in more dough than it does, is a reassuring tonic: Video game adaptations remain plodding affairs. Directed by Australian helmer Justin Kurzel, reuniting with his Macbeth stars Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, Assassin’s Creed is resolutely stone-faced, ditching the humdrum quips that are par for the course in today's blockbusters. But this is almost two hours of convoluted hokum that might have benefited from a few self-deflating jabs. "What the f— is going on," wonders Fassbender at one point. If only you could discern the shadow of a wink.

Assassin's Creed reps Fassbender's first film as a producer, though it's hard to see what excited him about it, given that he's got nothing to play. Game characters are ciphers by nature, with none of the idiosyncrasies that might complicate our ability to slip into their avatars frictionlessly. And although the film's hero is a new one invented for the big screen, writers Bill Collage and Adam Cooper (Exodus: Gods and Kings, Allegiant) and Michael Lesslie (Macbeth) haven't bothered to overlay anything fresh, like personality.

The film is at its most engaging during these medieval sequences, though free-running tilts across rooftops have been done to death, not least in Prince of Persia, from which the original Assassin's Creed game was spawned. Jake Gyllenhaal's 2010 movie version is a worthy point of comparison: no peach, perhaps, but at least straightforward — whereas Kurzel is hamstrung by a desultory present-day framing device, in which Fassbender mopes about a series of grey rooms in a blue jumpsuit while competing with Cotillard and Irons to see who can get through slabs of exposition with greater alacrity. Cotillard fares best, summoning a genuine sense of uncertainty amid all the utopian blather.

The Templars' grand scheme — "The history of the world is the history of violence," says Irons — is less interesting than the story's nod to themes of identity and religious strife, while the positing of the Christian Templars as oppressors of the obviously Moorish Assassins hints at a more subversive blockbuster than the one Assassin's Creed is content to be. Instead we get action sequences shorn of context propelled by characters who are anonymous, even if one of them looks like the star.

Kurzel's regular DP Adam Arkapaw (True Detective, The Light Between Oceans) mostly ditches the painterly tableaus of Macbeth for swooping topographic glides. Each world, from auto-da-fé to bunker, is evocatively rendered by production designer Andy Nicholson and costume designer Sammy Sheldon Differ. And composer Jed Kurzel (Slow West, The Babadook) capably steps into the blockbuster frame with a nicely hurtling score, traditional for the 15th century and electronic for this one until they begin to overlap, as the modern Assassins shake off their shackles for a franchise-bait ending that's all too abrupt.

Read full review at Hollywood reporter