Assassin's Creed: Avoid If You Suffer From The January Blues

Who said movies based on video games are bad? Well, they have a point. The only real effort that usually comes to mind is 2006’s horror epic Silent Hill, which brilliantly captured the nightmarish atmosphere of the games. Then there's 1995’s Mortal Kombat, but that’s usually before I remember it’s a film that hasn’t aged at all well. In other words; it’s pretty bad, but as a guilty-pleasure it’s still a better opponent than its sequels. The same goes for the original semi-decent Resident Evil movie, now squandered by its endlessly-reanimating and utterly-outlandish sequels. Angelina Jolie embodied a perfect incarnation of Lara Croft, though the films themselves were pretty lacklustre. 

So there aren't many, and the ratio from okay to downright terrible is staggering. Just consider the likes of Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, Max Payne, Dead Rising, to name but a few. And it'll come as no surprise that Hollywood still hasn't learned that not all games are manuscript-worthy, with the latest conversion based on the hugely-popular Assassin's Creed games in cinemas.

After being given the lethal injection, Callum Lynch (Fassbender) finds he has cheated death (or perhaps he has simply respawned) when he wakes in a mysterious, prison-like facility, where he’s told by a shady corporation that, like many other fellow prisoners, he must engage with the “Animus”; a machine which allows him to connect with his ancient ancestor, Aguillar, through whom he is able to observe the Spanish Inquisition where he must help them locate the mysterious “Apple of Eden”, a MacGuffin which contains the genetic code to human free will. 

The trailers didn’t exactly inspire much hope, the film resembling some sort of rock ‘n roll, MTV-type flick. That said, my curiosity always gets the better of me when it comes to video game-movies. I won’t digress here, though: there’s simply nothing good about this film, but then it’s so inexcusably-dark it’s actually hard to tell. From what I was able to visually-decipher, it’s pretty noisy and incoherent from the get-go, and is ironically laden with characters who convey about as much emotion and humanity as video game characters themselves, leaving you to wonder whether the filmmakers took the reformatting of the game series a little too seriously. But then it’s all very serious stuff; the film desperately lacking in humour, heart, soul and charm in its entirety, with the more-dead-eyed-than-usual Marion Cotillard and the sour-faced robot that is Jeremy Irons certainly not helping matters. The film is also so horribly-edited and seemingly-rushed that it feels like watching a trailer the whole time. I just wish it had ended as quickly.

Perhaps the only fascinating thing about this film – and not in a good way - is that upon entering the Animus, Callum Lynch is warned that he cannot change the past and can only observe, a strange plot-feature given it’s based on a game in which you certainly can control your in-past avatar-ancestor, thereby rendering the film a total waste of such an otherwise-interesting concept, and one which at least made the games mildly entertaining because of it. And this odd choice is also strangely-reminiscent of video game cut-scenes; the parts of the game we simply have no control over. I get that the film is supposedly about free will or the lack thereof, but what happened to good old fashioned entertainment? 

Desperate to be The Matrix for the stronger-than-ever video game generation, in both execution and its (ill-explored) underlying messages about free will, this is nothing more than a great example of style over substance. If you’re happy to wait for it to show up on Netflix, though – and show up it will - just make sure you adjust the screen brightness accordingly.