REVIEW

IT MAY be 2017’s first release but Assassin’s Creed is also an early contender for worst movie of the year.

It was always going to be a battle between two opposing sets of expectations. On the one hand, no major movie based on a video game has rated higher than 44 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. On the other, the trio of Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard and Australian director Justin Kurzel made the very excellent Macbeth in 2015 — so Assassin’s Creed wasn’t always destined to follow the curse.

And yet it did. Oh, boy, did it ever. The experience of watching Assassin’s Creed is, one imagines, not dissimilar to slowly drowning in a giant slop bucket while desperately looking for a rope to climb out from the immense craptitude — only one never appears.

Based on a popular and profitable video game franchise, the movie sought to simplify the complicated layers of the game’s suspend-your-disbelief mythology — that your ancestors’ memories are embedded within your DNA — but fails to make you care about the centuries-old war between the Templars and the Assassins.

In the film, Callum Lynch (Fassbender) is a death row prisoner preparing to meet his maker. But rather than die on the execution table, he wakes up in a cold lab staring into the face of Dr Sophia Rikkin (Cotillard). Sophia tells Callum that his genetic code holds the answer to the lost location of the Apple of Eden (a MacGuffin of the highest order).

Sophia belongs to the modern day incarnation of the Templars, who seeks to subjugate humanity by robbing everyone of their free will but to do this they need the Apple. Callum is the descendant of an Assassin named Aguilar from the early days of the Spanish Inquisition who is the last person known to have seen the Apple.

By attaching Callum to a Matrix robot-like machine, Sophia can unlock his genetic memory and access his ancestor’s experiences. But can Callum, whose family were Assassins, the sworn enemy of the Templars, really betray his calling?

If that already sounds confusing, it’s got nothing on what’s depicted over the film’s almost two hours of screen time. The only scene that rings true comes about one-third of the way in when Fassbender’s character says to no one in particular, “What the f**k is going on?!”.

That line is everyone in the audience.

There’s a female Assassin character (Ariane Labed) whose name you will never remember because she appears to serve absolutely no narrative or character purpose other than so the filmmakers can say, “Look over here, we have a female assassin, we’re really diverse!”.

So it’s saying a lot when Labed’s completely undeveloped and disposable character makes more sense than the thankless “role” Michael K. Williams (The Wire) is saddled with.

Perhaps the most confusing aspect of Assassin’s Creed is how it Shanghaied so many talented thespians. Apart from Fassbender (who has been attached to this project for over four years and is also a producer) and Oscar-winner Cotillard, this movie counts among its cast Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling and Brendan Gleeson, all of whom phoned it in from their trailers.

Kurzel has clearly made an effort to mimic the aesthetics of the game — the 15th century flashback scenes are heavily tinted in ochres and greys — but it makes the film look drab.

He used smoke and mist to astonishing dramatic effect in Macbeth, but here dust and smoke only cloaks what’s happening on screen. Maybe you can make an argument that it’s supposed to reflect the secrecy of the sects but it actually makes the movie visually confusing and dull.

Assassin’s Creed’s only redemption is how it handled the game’s signature parkour-esque rooftop chases. Those sequences are genuinely thrilling.

But it’s nowhere near enough to save the movie from itself.

Rating: 1/5

Assassin’s Creed is in cinemas from January 1.

Continue the conversation on Twitter with @wenleima.