★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
After the moderate success of Duncan Jones’ Warcraft (yes, I’m one of those people), the future for cinematic video game adaptions
seemed hopeful. Looking at the roll call for Assassin’
Creed, the light shone brighter still: director Justin Kurzel, his brother
and composer Jed, cinematographer Adam Arkapaw, and the two powerhouse leads of
their Macbeth retelling; Michael
Fassbender and Marion Cotillard…what could possibly go wrong?
The moment I gave up on Assassin's
Creed as a video game was when I failed an early tutorial mission. I was
unsuccessful in my attempts to push through a crowd of peasants without
smashing any of their pottery, and consequently spent a lot of time watching
others play the game instead. I know little else beyond the essential setup,
the increasingly tangled plotlines and the bugbears that plagued Unity: upon first release, human faces
were missing a lot of their features, leading to quest conversations between
two characters composed only of disembodied eyeballs and teeth floating above
their clothes. With the benefit of hindsight, those ludicrous interactions
proved far more entertaining than any dialogue in Kurzel's film.
Fassy stars as Callum Lynch; a convict smuggled out of death
row by Jeremy Irons’ sinister Abstergo Industries and informed by Sofia
(Cotillard) that he’s the last remaining descendant of an ancient order, the
Assassins. During the Spanish inquisition, Cal’s ancestor, Aguilar, hid away
the fabled Apple of Eden, a biblical McGuffin with the power to control the
free will of man. Using the Animus (a big robot arm with lots of needles,
explained in gloriously straight-faced techno-babble by Cotillard), Cal is
able to experience the memories of his ancestor, Aguilar (Fassbender, only
slathered in dirt and beard), in a search for the Apple’s location.
From pretty much the first shot, I knew I wasn’t going to
get along with this film. The camera makes an incredibly awkward, ungainly
digital movement across a mountain, drops about 50 feet for no reason, then
lumbers upwards to establish a castle location: the cinematic equivalent of an
OAP attempting to clamber out of their recliner, realising they left their
chocolate digestive behind halfway through, sitting back down, then trying to
get up again as if nothing’s happened. The film, too, is in a constant state of
wondering whether to stay or go. It’s pulled in half by wanting to faithfully
honour the source material (without Fassbender’s early discussions with game
studio Ubisoft, it’s doubtful this would have seen the light of day), but also
wanting to forge its own story.
What makes this problematic is that the new story is total an(im)us.
It spends an unholy amount of time on exposition yet we’re still searching for
answers: is Callum only seeing the events or does he enact them? If it’s merely
some kind of brain cinema, what’s the point of all the leaping about? What's
the significance of Denis Ménochet as a security chief who always
looks on the verge of corpsing? And, most importantly; why should I care about
Aguilar? Entire action set pieces are wasted on a character I know is going to
survive up to a certain point, as well as attempting to muster up emotional
support for a sidekick who I had to look up on IMDb because, in all 140 minutes
of the film, she’s never named (for the record, it’s Maria).
Sure, the runny-jumpy-stabby fun occasionally recreates the
balletic abandon of the classic games, but isn't quite enough to make up for
lack of engagement, throwing some passable parkour and Jed Kurzel’s gloriously thudding
score into the mix with all the artistic splendour of banging a pair of muddy
football boots together in a renaissance art exhibition. I’m usually tripping
over myself to applaud a film for technical merit over any other faults, but it’s
hard to wax lyrical about an individual aesthetic when it’s presented so
poorly.
Fassbender is clearly trying (it’s more his pet project than
Kurzel’s), and Michael Kenneth Williams as a snarky fellow prisoner appears to
be only one who knows what film he’s in or having any fun with it. Cotillard –
having used all her power to keep Brad Pitt adrift in Allied – barely moves a facial muscle, and Irons stops every now
and again to have a Vietnam-style flashback to his time served in 2000’s
hideous Dungeons and Dragons. Unlike D&D, however, this isn’t a total
failure: I know from close experience that fans of the game have found much
more to enjoy, and I’ll admit there’s some cheap thrills that escape the sticky
clamour of the messy CGI and dustcloud visuals. Nevertheless, it’s films like
this that ensure my gut remains filled with apprehension for something like Blade Runner 2049: all the talent in the
universe can’t save an inherently unnecessary story.
