Movie Review: Assassin's Creed.

Adapting a video game into other media is not easy. It's almost become expected for game properties to make bad films, and that's usually because they don't have enough story to form the basis of a proper narrative structure from beginning to end. What happens when the opposite is the case? 

Assassins Creed is a video game series that to date spans 20 games. It's known for having one of the most complex, sophisticated science fiction story-lines in modern gaming, and there's no sign of it slowing down anytime soon. Can you truly condense hundreds of hours of gaming into a single film, and bring with it the thrill and excitement of controlling a character running across a rooftop and shimmying down an awning, sneaking from shadow to shadow to finally piece the heart of your foe with a hidden blade? 

Let's take a look at Assassins Creed. 

Callum Lynch is a man on death row, a man made cold-hearted by the murder of his mother at the hands of his own father. When Cal is secretly spirited away from his own execution to awaken in the offices of the sinister Abstergo corporation, he learns that he will be the test subject in the ongoing experiments of Doctor Sofia and her amazing Animus. Only Cal possesses the genetic data necessary to use the Animus for its true purpose, and Cal must learn to master the machine's secrets, as well as escape the open walled prison he finds himself within.

Now, a plot-line that is already tenuously coherent in the source material is similarly so here, with quickly summarized techno-babble and inconsistent physics detailing the powers of the enigmatic Animus machine. The life's work of Doctor Sofia, the Animus allows people to relive the details of their ancestors, presented in a giant holographic simulacrum. The Animus machine itself is here depicted as a giant VR machine, complete with moving robotic arm, that allows Cal to re-enact every move, jump and thrust of combat throughout his reliving of  his ancestor Aguilar's adventures. This provides plenty of simple physics plot holes by its existence alone, but as the source material simply had the Animus as something out of an Ikea catalog, it gives some movement and energy to Cal's trip through the Animus that would otherwise be watching Michael Fassbender pretend to twitch in his sleep for half the film, so it's an understandable change.

The problem here really isn't so much some wonky science, it's really with Cal himself. For a hero, he is astoundingly unlikable. He's a man on death row for unrepentant murder. He's cold, dark, and unpleasant. If we are to care if Cal escapes his predicament, we need to care about him. We at least need to like him a little, and for some time it really isn't quite clear if Cal of Sofia is the one we should be rooting for here, as neither of them show much heroism. Cal shuffles from scene to scene, engaging the other test subjects in vague dialogue, and doesn't care what happens to him. He has no driving plot of his own, no home to return to, no child to save. He even seems unconcerned with solving the murder of his own mother.

What should be the highlight of the film, of course, the adventures of the guild of Assassins in war torn Spain under the inquisition of Torquemada, is simply not very exciting. You would think, with a title like Assassin's Creed, this would be the story of an Assassination. The plot and counter plot, the plan, the lead up to the climactic strike, these are the things that should have formed the thread that ties the adventures of Aguilar together. Unfortunately this is not the case. The entire film is a simple macguffin story, an item is lost, and Abstergo want to know where in history it was last seen. It is not compelling, it is not even interesting.

Each time Cal ventures back into the story of Aguilar in the search for the mysterious object, it's another loosely connected chapter in what seems to be the Guild of Assassins routinely messing up. These characters are meant to be skilled, trained assassins, striking from the shadows and disappearing like ghosts. We see none of the suggested skill or brilliance in the events of the past, in fact almost all of the Guild are killed in the first scene by random guards, leaving the surviving duo of Assassins to spend each scene they are in to ineptly be discovered and pursued noisily through buildings. These tiresome chase scenes form the basis of each regression into the Animus. They are loud, showy, full of flips and suspiciously modern parkour, and absolutely none of the excitement or physical thrill that they should deliver. There is more brilliance and tension packed into the on foot chase scene at the beginning of 'Casino Royale' than in the entirety of Assassin's Creed. Each scene here simply feels like a farce, with nameless goons chasing after the fleeing assassins from every angle, seemingly ahead of the heroes at every turn, to be punched and kicked, and then chase after them some more. You could stick the Benny Hill theme over most of these scenes and it wouldn't feel out of place, really. The film's production spent a lot of time boasting of the amazing feat of actually shooting the franchises famous 'leap of faith', a freefall from incredibly height. If they'd actually shot the thing, you certainly could have fooled me, as the scenes are covered in such heavy CGI fog and filler, that any real stunt performed is lost.

The absence of a compelling villain is a huge detractor in a film about professional Assassins. The games knew this, and even though the stories were 'find the item' plots as well, each had fiendish historical villains to eliminate in complex plots along the way. Here, we are presented with a handful of bad guys, none of which fit the bill.

Torquemada himself is of course the villain of the time period, and certainly is presented here as the big bad early on, and although he's present, he plays no impacting role in the heroes story. There is a big, scary looking warrior who seems to always be present to chase our Assassins, and gets a lot of screen-time looking intimidating, but he's a nobody. He doesn't get any lines, or as far as I caught, even a name.

It is thus left to the characters in the present to form the true villains of the piece, and they are unfortunately, both uninteresting to us as the viewers, and seemingly uninterested in the events of the story as well. The stone faced Jeremy Irons is the manager of the Abstergo institute. He's not particularly evil, he's even a supportive father to his daughter Sofia. We're not given any reason to dislike him, and he doesn't really do anything to make Cal dislike him either. He actually treats Cal remarkably fairly, all things considered. If we aren't in our seats waiting to see a great villain get his comeuppance, why would we be interested in watching a film about heroic assassins? There is a recurring mention of the Templar order as overarching villains, but we barely see them, and they don't seem to be all that invested in the events of the story at all, happy to pull their funding to the Animus project and move on right from early events of the film. If even the main bad guys don't want to waste their time with the story-line, why should we?

Assassin's Creed comes to its finale with a collection of events, some out of nowhere with characters we never got to know, others half-hearted resolutions to plot lines that simply never paid off. It ends with an uninspired whisper, some bait for future films, and no solid resolution for the events we've seen. I could confidently say it's the worst film I've seen in 2016, and it's been a shit year, everything considered. I was not excited, I was not thrilled, and the only real assassination in the film is truly anti-climactic in the most PG-13 way possible.

You will find more to enjoy in the franchise's games than in this adaptation. There's more compelling stories to be found, more likable heroes, more devious villains, and more simple entertainment in any of them than you'll find here.