Chris At The Pictures

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.

First-time director Ilya Naishuller thrusts us into the headspace of Henry, a cyber-enhanced mute with a memory block in this camera-toppling POV action thriller. After escaping weirdo supervillain Akan (Danila Kozlovsky) and desperate to reconnect with his wife (Haley Bennett), Henry is forced to run, shoot and jump his way across the streets of Moscow in search of answers (and a new battery), occasionally aided by Sharlto Copley as multi-bodied madman Jimmy.

With the plot itself a backdrop conveyor belt to the central gimmick and a protagonist prevented from speaking, the head-crunching joyride and supporting cast are left to fill in the gaps. The best we have in the latter category is Copley as our incessantly annoying NPC quest-giver and Kozlovsky as Akan; a bizarrely boring mix of Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor and Tommy Wiseau.

The unique perspective of the film is a diverting element, for sure, but the field of view is a GoPro fishbowl that makes the hundred mile-an-hour action an imbalanced combination of dizzying and incoherent until the final ultraviolent boss battle: stuffed with inventive dismemberment and employment of Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ as a cheat code to gleeful abandon, it’s the one sequence that can bear the much-touted video game comparison proudly.

Ultimately, said video game mimicry cripples Hardcore Henry. The recurring glitch of passenger seat syndrome so often inherent in video game adaptations is replaced by an exasperating adherence to all the worst tropes of modern day first-person shooters: forced stealth sections, on the rails vehicle warfare and unescapable tutorials are the lesser of many evils. Greater offence is dealt by the dialogue, childish indulgence in splatter and misogyny disguised as heroism. Replete with seductive 18-certificate, excessive female nudity, gay panic humour and liberal use of the word ‘pussy’, this potentially exciting cinematic experiment discards invention to become the perfect fodder for pubescent brats commonly found hurling insults over Xbox Live.

Pixels (based on a short internet film of the same name) depicts the fallout when footage of video games sent into space are misinterpreted by an alien race as a battle challenge. The aliens attack in the form of classic video game characters (realised rather brilliantly by state-of-the-art special effects), and arcade champions Brenner (Adam Sandler), Ludlow (Josh Gad) and Eddie ‘Fireblaster’ (Peter Dinklage) are recruited by Colonel Violet (Michelle Monaghan) to halt the invasion.

Now that’s not too bad of a premise, or at least it would be if the rules of the games were ever properly explained, made any sense, and weren’t just a vehicle to say ‘Ugly, overweight nerds deserve fame and sex because “they’ll appreciate it more”’.

Let’s begin with the honking great elephant in the room: Adam Sandler. Of course, the second he was announced as the lead, we’ve been bombarded with all sorts of articles and think-pieces about how the pride of Manchester, New Hampshire is heralding the end-of-days for cinema. Obviously he is, but in Pixels it’s the character of Sam Brenner, rather than Sandler himself, that is the slimiest element. Within thirty minutes, Brenner has already stolen a jar of money from a child, leered at Monaghan’s backside in plain view of her son, called her a snob for not kissing him and berated a group of soldiers for being ‘a bunch of girls’. Our saviour, everyone!

The remainder of the cast aren’t much to shout about either: Monaghan is drafted in to serve as the lone woman with a voice outside of serving puerile humour, Josh Gad reverts to shrieking when the piecemeal script runs dry (which is a lot), Kevin James is presumably tired from his Paul Blart shenanigans so gives zero effort, and Peter Dinklage is totally, utterly inexcusable. As much as it bothers me how much 80’s nostalgists control our various sources of TV and film, seeing them represented by such a torpid bunch almost makes me feel embarrassed on their behalf. It’s not even real nostalgia: there’s no depth of reflection here, just a group of talentless frauds showing you Pac-man and saying ‘Hey, remember that?!’

Aside from all the anguish the film has already caused to real-life fans of retro arcade games, there’s also additional insult here for people of colour (the only characters in the film captured by the aliens hail from minority backgrounds, and Serena Williams is gifted the horrid celebrity cameo as she is pimped out to Dinklage’s character), for women (the second most active woman on-screen is presented to Ludlow as a literal trophy who cannot speak) and basically for anyone with an ounce of taste. There was even pain reserved for yours truly, when Gad takes a breather from squealing his every line like a stuck pig to sing Tears For Fears’ classic hit ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’, thereby ruining my favourite song forever.

I wouldn’t usually resort to such vulgar language, but if Sandler and co. are allowed to sneak slimy ‘humour’ into a supposedly family-friendly film, frankly anything goes: big, sweaty summer blockbuster season blew it’s load early this year, and Pixels is nothing more than the mess left behind, wiped up lazily with cinema tickets then left to fester in screens nationwide.