Video game adaptations rarely ever work. So it should come as no surprise that with all the video game movies that came out this year, none were a critical success. Amidst their failures, it was up to Assassin’s Creed to come in and prove once and for all that video game adaptations can be done well. Sadly, it failed at that job miserably and I feel the only reason I’m not gonna call this thing the worst video game movie I’ve ever seen is because Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within still exists.
The film follows death row inmate Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender), whose assassin father killed his mother when Callum was young. On the day of Lynch’s execution, he’s brought into Abstergo and greeted by scientist Sophia Rikkin (Marion Cotillard) who tells him that she’ll be using a machine called the Animus to tap into Lynch’s mind to find out where his ancestor (also played by Fassbender) hid the mysterious Apple of Eden so her father (Jeremy Irons) may obtain it for the Templars, who wish to use the Apple’s power to destroy free will.
On the surface, the film sounds exactly like the plot of any Assassin’s Creed game and in some regard, it most definitely looks and feels like one of the games. However, Assassin’s Creed ultimately fails to make any of that into an interesting film.
While the stuff with the Animus makes for a serviceable concept for the game’s, it’s a pacebreaker for the film. There’s essentially two different stories going on here, the stuff in the present day and the stuff taking place in 1492. Most of the film’s focus is on the modern day events and because of that, the stuff in the past suffers horribly. None of the characters are allowed to fully develop and there’s huge jumps between events that leave certain aspects unexplained. Not to say the stuff that takes place in the present is any better.
There are absolutely no interesting characters to be found here. None of them have anything resembling a personality and everyone’s motivations are shaky at best. And when all’s said and done, nothing feels accomplished and so many loose ends are left untied for the sake of potentially making a sequel. Yep, it’s one of THOSE endings.
The jumps between the two stories makes the film’s pacing feel all over the place. I don’t know how it’s possible, but the people behind this made a film that feels extremely rushed, but also really slow and clunky. This ultimately affects the character’s decisions throughout the film. For example, without spoiling anything, there’s a point where Lynch (in one of the film’s few decent scenes) decides to willingly help Abstergo get what they want from from his ancestor’s memory. But immediately after doing so, he decides, for seemingly no reason, that he doesn’t want to anymore. There’s no clear reasoning behind anyone’s motivations in this film and that, to me, makes for very lazy character development.
The action scenes all feel like overlong set pieces that would be much more fun to play as a game than watch as a movie. And because the film did a terrible job at establishing the characters here, the action scenes become surprisingly boring as well. It doesn’t help that the scenes aren’t filmed particularly well and the editing is so frantic in a laughable attempt to hide any blood for the sake of a PG-13 rating. It’s a mess to look at. Speaking of which, I’m shocked that they felt so desperate for a PG-13 rating when this is based on a game series that has always been rated M by the ESRB.
There are some bright spots in the film, thanks in part to the performances by Michael Fassbender, Jeremy Irons and Brendan Gleeson for as brief as he’s in it, but none of them can ultimately fix what is a broken story with absolutely no character. Aside from them, the acting is mostly subpar and Marion Cotillard ends up giving a performance with about as much charisma as a GPS voice.
Assassin’s Creed may look and feel like the games, but it doesn’t make for a good movie. In fact, I’d argue it makes for an absolutely terrible one. With an underdeveloped story and equally underdeveloped characters, it just proves to be another terrible video game adaptation that fails on nearly every level.