Assassin’s Creed (2016)
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Assassin’s Creed Movie Review
Assassin’s Creed is a 2016 science fiction action film directed by Justin Kurzel and starring Michael Fassbender. It’s a pretty bad video game movie adaptation.
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“We work in the dark to serve the light.
We are assassins“
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With the help of technology, Callum learns that he is a descendant of a dangerous society. He travels back in time to learn about his ancestors and acquire skills to defeat an evil organization. First off, I am a huge fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. I love these games to death. But even as a fan I have to admit that the storytelling in them is, though full of promise, highly messy and convoluted. For a film adaptation, you would need a great scenarist and filmmaker to pull off this complex task.
And this film did not find one in Michael Lesslie and Justin Kurzel. What they did here was quite poor. I applaud the effort, but it just did not pan out for them or for anybody else involved, especially Fassbender, who lost a lot after this movie. The first huge mistake on their part was to create a new storyline that is set in this universe and has many references to the games, but isn’t an adaptation of any previous game at all. This was a terrible choice as an Ezio movie would have done wonders to make it more appealing to larger audiences.
1492 Andalusia during the Granada War was a pretty terrific choice for the setting and time period for a film, but ultimately they failed to imbue this story with the historical references and insight necessary for this type of experiment. What was particularly troubling was the lack of any truly memorable or well defined historical figures as they were all underdeveloped and forgettable.
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Michael Fassbender was pretty good as the protagonist and especially terrific in his action scenes. But the rest of the cast was utterly underutilized as Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Irons mostly got to deliver overlong, boring speeches that didn’t go anywhere. This Assassin’s Creed movie is also horrendous-looking in its grainy, dusty aesthetic that felt cheap and uninspired despite a big budget.
The score and cinematography are fine, and the action was quite well executed, but there is only so much that the game references can do for you before you succumb to the utter disinterest in this project. Yes, there was a lot of parkour, jumping on buildings and killing with blades, but the heart and spirit of the games was still absent as well as the purpose. Yes, there wasn’t too much action here surprisingly enough, but the emphasis on plot was even more unfortunate as the movie felt overstuffed, overwritten and too convoluted and dull in its numerous speeches and barely explained SF elements. There was way too much of the present and not enough of the past here.
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2016’s Assassin’s Creed movie was another bad video game adaptation. I am a huge fan of the games, but even I have to admit that the storytelling in these games is quite messy and convoluted, so a film adaptation would need to have a particularly strong screenplay to pull it off, which this one certainly did not. Yes, Michael Fassbender was excellent in the main role. The action was also solidly executed. But the overstuffed, overplotted and joyless nature to the movie spelled its doom. It was too complicated, overly reliant on speeches and too underdeveloped in its characters for audiences to care about it whatsoever. It was a giant missed opportunity.
My Rating – 2
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