Full disclaimer: I am in no way a gamer and have absolutely no prior knowledge about the video game’s universe. All I knew before going in was that Michael speaks Spanish for some reason so when I got the invite from E, my Cebu and Dumaguete travel buddy, I knew that I had to see it. Luckily it launched the same time as my annual weeklong leave from the office so we got to watch it on the day of its release.

Without further ado, here is the round up of Justin Kurzel’s (Macbeth 2011) Assassin’s Creed.

Please note that there may be spoilers.  Read at your own risk.

THE STORY:

Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender – X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)) is a troubled man with violent tendencies – probably the direct result of seeing his own father murder his mother when he was a child. As a grown man, he is up on the chopping block, quite literally, as he has been sentenced to death by lethal injection for murder.   He gets the full nine – the last meal, the private session with the priest – and he quietly accepts his fate, laying down calmly and closing his eyes as the drugs are pumped into his system.

Well, the joke’s on him because he wakes up not long after and finds himself in the middle of Abstergo Foundation’s research facility. The first thing Cal sees is the face of Sofia (Marion Cotillard – Allied (2016)), the daughter of Abstergo founder Alan Rikkin (Jeremy Irons – The Borgias), who proceeds to tell him that she and her father, along with the secret society of the Templars, are on a hunt for the Apple, a magical sphere that contains the genetic code for free will. Sophia explains that this could possibly be the cure of the human race’s natural predisposition to violence and that they need Cal and his genes because the last known holder of the Apple was Cal’s Spanish ancestor Aguilar de Nerha. They need Cal to go into the Animus machine so that they can access his genetic memory and find where Aguilar, a member of the Assassins Brotherhood, hid the coveted apple.

THE GOOD:

1. Michael Fassbender speaking smexy Spanish.

   

2. Brendan Gleeson and his son Brian just by virtue of being Gleesons.
3. Jeremy Irons who was the only one in this entire movie who delivered his lines in a human way. He even snuck in a joke!

   

4. The parkour sequences were pretty rad. They could have easily gotten away with building the movie around the complicated sequences of people jumping from one building to another, I think.
5. The animus CGI was pretty cool. A little bit dark, but pretty seamless in integrating the “memories” with the “present”, especially that scene where Aguilar was scaling a wall.

   

THE BAD:

1. The general bad acting of the cast, which included Fassbender and Cotillard. They were too frakin’ robotic. For some reason almost every actor in this movie agreed to play their parts with the ‘dead-in-the-eyes’ look.
2. The confusing fight sequences, which were pretty much all over the place.   Considering that this was a movie about a brotherhood of assassins, you would think that they would have put in more effort.
3. The underdeveloped and poorly written secondary characters who obviously were only in the movie for the attack in the end.

THE UGLY:

1. Plot holes for days! The film pretty much lost me when they started babbling about genetic memory because I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept. If Aguilar and the other members of the Assassins Brotherhood were able to imprint their memories onto their DNA, does that mean that their adventures happened prior to them bearing offspring? Because if Aguilar had his child who bore the lineage of Cal Lynch before he hid the Apple, how could the memories of him hiding it be passed down to an offspring who was born before the experience? I’m over thinking this, I know, but the whole thing just popped into my head during the movie and I couldn’t get it out. Also, if the descendants can acquire the skills and physical prowess of their badass ancestors, why did it take them so long to over throw the prison? Another one: you mean to tell me that the Templars and the Assassins have been killing each other for the Apple centuries before the technology to use what’s inside was available?
2. The movie was obviously trying to be clever by showing that Sofia had an Assassin ancestor. It didn’t make a lick of sense for Sofia and her father not knowing that she had Assassin ancestry.
3. The ending. Okay, so let’s say that I buy the idea of Cal and his newfound friends acquiring deadly skills because of the time they spend in the animagus. What next? How could they possibly hope to escape the Templars when they have no money, no connections and are part of a wiped-out brotherhood? In my head, it’ll only take a year at best for them to evade the Templars before Cal and his merry band of sidekicks get gunned down.

All in all, Kurzel’s Assassin’s Creed was a waste not at all worth seeing, which was boggling because his Macbeth got pretty good reviews. I think it’s another case of the actors dabbling in matters they’re not at all equipped to dabble with. Fassbender is one of the producers of this movie and in the IMDB trivia page it says there that he and Cotillard spent some time altering the finished script to “flesh out their characters” and to “tweak the story”, obviously hurting the film in the long run because the both story and the characters didn’t really make much sense. The actors, who are both fantastic at what they do, should have just stuck to acting and let their capable director do his own thing.

THE VERDICT: 2/10 (extra point only because of the shirtless Michael Fassbender scene)

*All photos are lifted from the film’s IMDB page.