Film review: Assassin’s Creed is a great idea that takes a wrong turn

Michael Fassbender as Cal Lynch, left, and Ariane Labed as Maria in Assassin’s Creed. AP Photo

Assassin’s Creed

Director: Justin Kurzel

Stars: Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons

Two stars

There have been sillier film premises, but even in a year that gave us Independence Day: Resurgence, I am hard pressed to think of anything as convoluted and, in the end, joyless and unrewarding as Assassin's Creed.

Basically, a death-row inmate is saved by a shadowy organisation 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.

Assassin's Creed is trying to give a serious origin story to the popular video-game series and set up possible future films – but it is hard to get interested in this one, let alone any sequels.

Director Justin Kurzel’s film embodies the worst tendencies of modern blockbusters to feel not like a full movie, but a trailer for what is to come – a television pilot on the big screen. This has become the default for franchise storytelling, where studios force audiences to demand more by not giving them a full story in the first place.

In the case of Assassin's Creed, they try to give an emotional entry into an 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 him as a child, who returns home one day to find his mum dead. His dad is wearing a hooded cape, holding a knife and tells Cal he needs to get out and “live in the shadows”. Then some government types in black SUVs storm the house as Cal escapes across the rooftops.

Did his dad kill his mum? Was he trying to protect Cal? And what was with that cape? The answers sort of come, but not for a while, by which time you may have forgotten that you were supposed to care in the first place.

Fast-forward and Cal (Michael Fassbender) is about to be executed – but then wakes up in an operating room where Sofia (Cotillard) explains that her company faked his death and he will now be working for her and her father (Jeremy Irons).

Cal, sensing that their frequent reassurances that he is not a prisoner means exactly the opposite, attempts to escape, in the first of at least three unintentionally hilarious slow-mo sequences.

They hook him up to an insane contraption called the Animus that allows Cal to relive the memories of his Assassin ancestor in 1492 Spain – basically plugging him into an incredibly realistic video game – where he and his fellow Assassins hunt for the Apple of Eden, a device created by a technologically advanced prehuman civilisation.

It is all so relentlessly dumb and confusing. Even the visuals lack flair – which is surprising given Kurzel turned in the stylish Macbeth last year, also starring Fassbender and Cotillard.

In the end, the real mystery has little to do with Assassins, Templars or the Apple of Eden, and more to do with why so many talented actors and filmmakers thought this was a good idea.

• Assassin’s Creed is now showing in cinemas

* Lindsey Bahr / AP