Movie Review: Assassin’s Creed

A man is executed by lethal injection ten minutes into Assassin’s Creed, though the film’s demise is much slower and more drawn out. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.

The man is Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender), but the execution is just a front. He wakes up from his “death” to find himself in the custody of Alan (Jeremy Irons) and Sophia Rikkin (Marion Cotillard), the father-daughter duo running a shady organisation seeking to “cure violence”.

Lynch, it turns out, shares the DNA of his ancestor, an assassin named Aguilar. With the help of a device known as the ‘Animus’, Lynch can be transported back to the time of the Spanish Inquisition and ‘re-enact’ Aguilar’s attempts to protect the Apple of Eden (yes, the original), which apparently contains the genetic code for “free will”, and which the Rikkins want to locate in the present day.

All of this is to say, Assassin’s Creed is incomprehensible nonsense that only grows more baffling and incoherent as it crawls to its 116th and mercifully final minute.

Aussie director Justin Kurzel (Snowtown) made this cheerless video game adaptation his follow-up to 2015’s Macbeth, perhaps because he was seeking something not so light and fancy-free as the Bard’s tragedy.

Macbeth also starred Fassbender and Cotillard, and we’ll generously assume they share with Kurzel a deep passion for relaying humanity’s finest texts, and not the allure of a major payday, to explain their participation. Still, I’m not sure we can justify the grandiose pomposity on this one, gang.

In one of the climactic battle sequences—the circumstances of which I still can’t fully unravel—Fassbender takes off his shirt and demonstrates his physique, so that was probably a bonus for him. Cotillard wears a raven-black bob wig; another perk. They get to share the screen with legends like Irons and, briefly, Charlotte Rampling. Character actors Michael K. Williams and Ariane Labed play fellow assassins with a penchant for just falling off buildings. Okay, I’m starting to understand everyone’s involvement now. The lunch-breaks must have been a blast.

Alas, Adam Arkapaw’s camera was not trained on the craft services table, so the audience is not spared from the movie proper, written by Michael Lesslie, Adam Cooper and Bill Collage (if you can call it that). Their tale raises more questions than it offers answers; questions like: “Why are they doing this to us?” and “What decisions in my life have led me to this cinema?”

Jed Kurzel, an innovative composer, attempts to pepper Arkapaw and Kurzel’s striking compositions, but there’s no seasoning a spoiled steak. At one point, even Fassbender’s character remarks, “What the f*** is going on?” Finally, some truth in art.

1.5/5

In cinemas January 1, 2017. Rated M for violence and coarse language.

Photo: Fox