‘Assassin’s’ anything but fun – Videogame film that’s cut above the others

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Yes, “Assassin’s Creed” is attempting to give a serious narrative origin story to the popular video game, ostensibly setting up interest in possible future films. But it’s hard to even feign interest in this one, let alone what might come next. Director Justin Kurzel’s film embodies the worst tendencies of modern blockbusters to feel not like a full movie, but a tease for what’s to come — a television pilot on the big screen. It’s become the de facto operating mode for franchise storytelling where instead of relying on a natural interest, the studios force audiences to want more by simply not giving them a full story in the first place.

In the case of “Assassin’s Creed,” they try to give an emotional entryway into understanding the ancient conflict between the Templars, who want order, and the Assassins, who have sworn to preserve free will at all costs, through the story of Cal Lynch. We meet Cal as a kid — a daredevil troublemaker who bikes home to find Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” blaring over the speakers and his mother dead at the kitchen table. His father, sporting a dramatic hooded cape, is there with a knife and tells Cal that he needs to get out and “live in the shadows.” Then some government types in black SUVs storm the house as Cal escapes on the rooftops.

Did his dad kill his mom? Was he trying to protect Cal? Does any of it make a bit of sense having never met any of these characters before? And what was with that cape? The answers sort of come, but not for a while. By that point you may have forgotten that you were supposed to care in the first place. The next time we meet up with Cal, he’s grown into Michael Fassbender and is on death row for murder (also left largely unexplored). His last words are that he’ll see his dad in hell, but, then he wakes up in an operating room where Sofia (Cotillard) explains to him that her company faked his death and now he’s going to work for her and her father (Jeremy Irons) but that he’s definitely not their prisoner. Cal, sensing probably that too many “you’re not a prisoner” declarations probably means the opposite, attempts to escape anyway, in the first of at least three unintentionally hilarious slow mo sequences, but to no avail. They soon hook him up to an insane contraption called the animus that takes Cal back to 1492 Spain — basically into a video game — where he and his fellow Assassins hunt down this Apple of Eden.

Confusing

It’s all so relentlessly dumb and confusing. Among its other sins, like three scenes in a row ending with Cal saying that he’s hungry, somehow three screenwriters decided that phrases like “you turn to violence, I turn to science” were really the best they had. Even the visuals lack flair — surprising since Kurzel turned in the stylish “Macbeth” last year with Fassbender and Cotillard. In the end, the real mystery has little to do with the Assassins, the Templars or the Apple of Eden and more to do with why so many talented thespians thought this was a good idea.

“Assassin’s Creed,” a 20th Century Fox release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for “for intense sequences of violence and action, thematic elements and brief strong language.” Running time: 115 minutes. One star out of four.

It used to be that when a highly touted actor — a prestigious actor, a thespian — agreed to star in a piece of schlock, he might be grateful for the work, but the job was still undertaken with a pinch of shame. When Laurence Olivier played a leering rapacious soap-opera gloss on Henry Ford in Harold Robbins’ “The Betsy” (1978), or when Michael Caine gallivanted around the globe to star in paycheck movies from “Blame It On Rio” to “Jaws: The Revenge,” no one was fooling anybody.

How times have changed. “Assassin’s Creed,” in which Fassbender plays some sort of leaping, fighting, time-tripping — but still moody and sullen — bare-chested historic warrior dude, is a mediocre video-game movie that has branded itself in a most revealing way. The film is coming off 20 years of soullessly trashy and forgettable video-game spinoffs (the “Mortal Kombat” and “Streetfighter” films, “Max Payne” and “BloodRayne,” the “Lara Croft” series, this year’s “Warcraft”). But “Assassin’s Creed” isn’t fighting the junkiness of that pedigree — it’s using it to prop up its own pretensions. The hook the producers are selling is, “Here, at long last, is a video-game movie that’s a cut above the others.”

Shot in somber sci-fi Renaissance tones, “Assassin’s Creed” has a “Masterpiece Theatre” cast that’s ten times classier than it needs, it cost more than $150 million to make, and it’s deeply self-serious about its long-ago-and-far-away setting: 15th-century Spain during the Inquisition, which means a lot of solemn religious dogma and burning at the stake. Fassbender takes on the role of Callum Lynch, a modern-day criminal saved from execution and forced to enter the memories of an Inquisition-era Assassin, as if he were playing Neo from “The Matrix” crossed with Hamlet. His every tragic gaze and saturnine grimace tells the audience that this isn’t just some glorified dystopian joystick ride — it’s real drama! Except that it isn’t. In “Assassin’s Creed,” Michael Fassbender is like the ultimate special effect. Just by showing up, he confers respectability on two hours of semi-coherent overly art-directed video-game sludge. (Agencies)

Callum has been saved from death by Alan Rikkin (Jeremy Irons), a mysterious CEO so lost in time that he still wears a black turtleneck, and his daughter, Sophia (Marion Cotillard), who is the lead scientist at Rikkin’s company, Abstergo Industries. It’s Sophia who oversees an experiment that’s the film’s mystical knockoff of virtual reality: Callum gets strapped into an airborne harness that looks like a dental X-ray machine from hell, with a monitor implanted in the back of his neck, and the apparatus zaps him back through time to channel the memories of Aguilar de Nerha, the Assassin who is his ancestor. Callum’s mission is to find the hidden location of the Apple of Eden (“The seed of mankind’s first disobedience”), which is somehow connected to the words of Christopher Columbus.

It’s not clear why any of this is happening, but to say that “Assassin’s Creed” doesn’t make a lot of sense would be both accurate and beside the point. The film’s plot is a shambles, yet everything in it links back, with loopy exactitude, to the past — like the suspicion that Callum’s father, Joseph (Brendan Gleeson), killed his mother, though at the behest of forces greater than himself. Or the fact that Abstergo Industries is a front for the Knights Templar, the order of Christian fighters who first emerged during the Crusades. Are we supposed to read some sort of higher statement into the fact that they’re the movie’s bad guys?

I won’t attempt to parse the fetishistic levels of “meaning” woven into the “Assassin’s Creed” video games, but in the movie the material is derivative in the extreme. Basically, we’re watching “The Matrix” and “The Da Vinci Code” get Cuisinarted into weaponized action sequences that look like they came off of old heavy-metal album covers. There’s an aura of cult doom hanging over the action, but that just makes everything on-screen feel glumly ritualized and abstracted. The Knights Templar, man! How sinister-theological-cool. It’s all a way of creating “mystery” where there is none.

A movie like “Assassin’s Creed” doesn’t just revolve around dueling cults (the Knights Templar v. the Assassins). The film is all about the cultish complexity of its cosmology; it treats its audience of video-game connoisseurs as a ready-made cult of fans eager to obsess over the film’s visual expansion of the games’ design. It’s seriously doubtful that the movie will find enough of those fans in the US to qualify as a domestic success. Yet that may not matter: In the suspended vagueness of its drama, “Assassin’s Creed” speaks the kinetic aesthetic language of the global market. As directed by Justin Kurzel, the film looks like a period painting recreated through pixels of murk; it suggests a Tony Scott movie lit by Vermeer. And it includes one spectacular money-shot image: men diving off of tall buildings, like superheroes with a touch of suicidal grandeur. (Agencies)

By Lindsey Bahr

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