Caught up on the Assassin’s Creed movie… this is the Michael Fassbender-led flick based on the long-running Ubisoft series of video games. It’s a kind of given that movies based on video games are bad with a tiny handful of rare exceptions. This movie… it’s better than the majority of those attempts if only in technical craft like cinematography, music, and acting. It’s a messy, dour, gloomy, dark film but I’ve seen much, much worse in this subgenre of films.
Basic premise follows the video games (which I haven’t played). A modern man is connected to the “animus” – a machine that transfers the mind back to the genetic memory of an ancestor (hand-waving abounds). In the past, you relive the events of your ancestor and, in the case of this movie, our hero is able to determine the final location of a MacGuffin – the Apple of Eden – which has been lost since the Spanish Inquisition (who would have expected it?). With the Apple, the surprise (??) bad guys will have the genetic code to free will.
Michael Fassbender plays our hero in the present as well as the past. He has been tried, sentenced, and executed for a nebulous murder that the script doesn’t feel the need to explain. The script also doesn’t really need to tell us who his character is… so leave it to Fassbender to out-act the movie and just suggest he wasn’t a very good man but maybe not THAT bad. Really, the script doesn’t care but Fassbender kind of nails it – probably the only actor in the movie who gave a damn about all the mumbo-jumbo dialog in the script. the kind of script where the only thing anyone says is obscure and dour expositition to get us from plot point A to B.
The other actors include Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Bendan Gleeson, and Charlotte Rampling… too good a cast for this movie and I think they think so too. Not that they mail it in, but they don’t try very hard… but, then again, the script probably made absolutely no sense to a bunch of actors who probably never played the games. Or heard of them.
The movie has the good graces to look remarkably good within the constraints of also looking remarkably bleak and grey. It’s obvious someone knows how to mount a camera or color-correct in the editing bay. I’m mixed as to whether any of it works because there’s not a shot that isn’t murky and gloom-filled… yet it somehow looks good within those constraints.
The action… also a complete mixed bag. There’s some obvious talent in the film-making and I’m pretty sure most of the stunts would be impressive if they weren’t so hard to see. There’s various kung-fu shots that were probably meant to be amazing but they weren’t filmed well, were too quickly edited, and (surprise) too dim to see well. The action suffers from shaky-cam, over-editing, and murk-vision. Plus, from a script level, there’s barely any attempt to make us care about what’s going on, at least until one of the final action scenes in the flick.
The thing is, about 3/4th of the way into the movie, I started to kind of get into it. That’s a long wait, sure, but at least something started to roll for me. Of course, what was working was also masked by a lot of “huh?” and “what’s going on now?” but at least the plot was kicking in. Sort of.
So the movie is a mess and it barely bothers to give us characters who have personality and motivation only as required by the plot. But it’s half technically well made and someone was caring about what was being put on screen. It’s not an amateur piece of junk like most adaptations are… but something went very wrong. Maybe the wrong director, editor, or cinematographer. I guess it’s only faint praise to say that the movie is better than the reviews make it out to be. I mean, this isn’t Double Dragon, Street Fighter, or Prince of Persia…But I think only action movie fans or real hardcore game fans will get anything out of it.
Score: 76