For everyone who thought Dan Brown’s conspiracy novels were just lacking a spot of parkour, Assassin’s Creed might be your favourite film of the year. But for the clinically sane 99.9 per cent of the rest of us, it’s rather less exciting.Starring Michael Fassbender as Assassin Number One, the film is a broadly obedient adaptation of an ongoing series of video games that began in 2007, in which two secretive, history-steering factions, the Assassins and the Knights Templar, vie over humanity’s right to free will (the first lot are pro, the second aren’t). At the centre of the struggle is an ancient magical artefact called the Apple of Eden: which contains, per Biblical doctrine, the seeds of humanity’s self-determination. Nice idea, but its name is repeated so often in the screenplay, its silliness soon becomes unignorable: after about half an hour, it might as well be called the Chipolata of Xanadu.
“I’m not sure I can make that work,” mutters Jeremy Irons’ shadowy technologist when his daughter Sofia (Marion Cotillard) suggests a typically overblown opening gambit for his latest speech, and it’s a problem the film’s tremendously talented cast and crew can’t stop brushing up against. The likes of Fassbender, Cotillard, Irons and Charlotte Rampling give it a square go – as does the film’s director, Justin Kurzel, who previously worked with Fassbender and Cotillard on Macbeth last year. (Cinematographer Adam Arkapaw and composer Jed Kurzel, the director’s younger brother, are two more gifted Macbeth holdovers.)
In fact if anyone was going to wring something of value from the franchise, you’d imagine it might be the team who took hold of a Shakespeare play Orson Welles, Roman Polanski and Akira Kurosawa had already been through, said ‘there’s something more we can do with this’, and turned out to be stonkingly right. But the adventures of a time-travelling, base-jumping, hoodie-wearing lunk don’t have quite the same mileage, and you can’t ever shake the sense that you’re watching a lot of good work in service of a very bad idea.
The film zips between two time periods, but the storyline in neither feels particularly substantial: here is a film that feels like it’s made up entirely of subplots. In the present day one, Fassbender plays Cal Lynch, a death row prisoner who’s enlisted into Irons and Cotillard’s biotech operation in an appropriately cloak-and-dagger fashion. Here he’s wired into a device called the Animus – a kind of Matrix jack-in point in the shape of a big robotic arm – via which he experiences the past life of his ancestor Aguilar de Nerha, a 15th century Spanish hitman who might hold the key to the Apple of Eden’s present whereabouts.
In visual terms alone, both realities are vividly realised by Kurzel and Arkapaw, who works with the same restricted palette that’s becoming something of a trademark. Gold and charcoal close-ups, ancient cities swirling with dust and ash, sterile blue concrete bunkers – lots of it looks great for as long as we’re allowed to look, but the usual twitchy blockbuster editing doesn’t allow much time for drinking in the view.
Fassbender’s left likewise scrabbling around for depth that isn’t there. Like Ben Affleck’s new rendition of Batman, Lynch is another of those pandering, self-pitying, sullen-but-virile man-children with the weight of the world swinging between his legs. No-one understands his pain, not least of all women: when Cotillard describes finding the Apple as her life’s work, Fassbender barks back: “It’s my life.”
Assassin’s Creed is leaps and bounds ahead of kitchen-sink-hurling flapdoodle like X-Men Apocalypse – it’s only the second-worst Fassbender star vehicle of 2016 – but it never allows him a sober moment, as that film did in a hushed Polish forest, where his talent, as opposed to his biceps, gets a stern workout.
Instead, in between the mostly bloodless stabbing and jumping, it’s all half-formed conspiracies, ancient orders, evil puppetmasters, and so on: the ‘Hashashin’ origin story from the Dan Brown book Angels & Demons is even recounted in appropriately hatchet-faced tones. Kurzel’s two previous features to date, Macbeth and Snowtown, weren’t exactly romps, but their venom took you to the outermost limits of human experience, and you left them changed. This one’s all bile, no substance.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk