Assassin's Creed

"What the f*** is going on?" - Dialogue from Assassin's Creed.

This is a question that the film's main character, Cal Lynch (Michael Fassbender), asks about 40 minutes into the film.  I had been asking that exact same question for much longer, and by that point, had not really been given an answer.  This is a murky and dumb movie that takes too much time to clue us in, unless you have played the video games that the film is based on.  By the time the answers did start coming, I had stopped caring.

The movie does come with an impressive cast.  Aside from Fassbender, we also have the invaluable Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Irons in supporting roles as shadowy characters who seem to know more than what they're telling.  But what are we to make of the plot?  And what are we to take from their involvement in this film?  Was the script really that much better before it went before the cameras?  Are these actors just big fans of the games that inspired it, and wanted to be a part of bringing it to the big screen? (I chuckle at the mental image of Jeremy Irons racing down to his local Gamestop in order to pre-order the latest game in the series, or anxiously downloading the newest DLC.) It's not so much that Assassin's Creed is hard to follow, it's that the plot is so insane and downright stupid that it's just not worth following.  Maybe the games tell the story better.  I have not played them, so I honestly don't know.  All I know is that the games cannot be as turgid as this film is.

Let me go over my memories of this film, and see if I can't make some sense out of the story it attempts to tell.  So, for the past six centuries or so, there has been a battle between the Templars, who want to control all free will and remove all violence from the world, and the Assassins, who want to protect free will.  The Templars have been after an object called the Apple of Eden, which supposedly possesses the ability to remove all free will from humanity, and make them mindless slaves of the shadowy organization.  How the Apple achieves this, I honestly don't know.  When we see it, it emits a strange blue light, which I guess is all of humanity's free will being sucked into it.  The movie doesn't explain.  Some 500 years ago, the Assassins hid the Apple somewhere, so the modern day Templars are using science to find the descendants of these Assassins, and hook them up to a device called the Animus, which allows them to connect mentally to their ancient Assassin ancestors.  With the people connected to the memories of the Assassins, the Templars hope to find out where the Apple is hidden, so they can rule the world.

The latest person to be forced into this bizarre experiment is the previously mentioned Cal Lynch, a Death Row murderer who, instead of getting a lethal injection, is instead kidnapped by the Templars and taken to their secret base, where a scientist named Sofia (Cotillard) tries to explain what's going on, and hooks Cal up to the Animus, so that he can be transported back into the memories of an Assassin in 1492 Spain.  The Animus looks like a giant robot arm which picks up Cal, and swings him around wildly all around the room.  Somehow, this is able to allow Cal to travel back in time, enter the body of the ancient Assassin whom he is descended from, and see everything that he sees.  The head of this cockamamie program is Rikkin (Irons), who has a number of other captives who he also hooks up to the Animus, trying to get information from their pasts about the Apple.  One of the prisoners is Cal's father (Brendan Gleeson), who murdered Cal's mother 30 years ago while dressed in a cloak and hood.  Or did he somehow save her life by killing her?  We get flashbacks of this moment scored by an obnoxious and distorted version of Patsy Cline's "Crazy" on the soundtrack.

The highlights of Assassin's Creed are obviously supposed to be the sequences where Cal finds himself inhabiting the body of an Assassin in 1492 Spain, but most of these big action sequences are filmed so ineptly, they're hardly worth commenting on.  Not only are they completely bloodless and unexciting (most likely due to the film's toned down PG-13 rating, when it was obviously meant to be an R at one point), but they've been filmed in such a way so that much of the action is covered by smoke, soot, dust or in grimy and dark underground tunnels.  It got to the point that I wanted to spray Windex on the screen.  From what I could see of the action, I don't think I was missing much, as the fight choreography didn't exactly seem all that impressive.   And by the time the plot starts explaining this madness to us, we wish we could go backwards.  Not to the beginning of the movie, mind you, but to the moment we handed our money to the ticket counter, so we could put the money back in our pocket.

This is an artless and incompetent film that somehow managed to attract some genuine talent, only to throw them to the wolves with one of the most ludicrous plots of any movie this year.  In a year already full of bad to mediocre video game adaptations (Ratchet & Clank, Warcraft, and The Angry Birds Movie), Assassin's Creed easily leaps to the bottom of the barrel.

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