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Assassin's Creed
Fox // PG-13 // December 21, 2016
List Price: Unknown [Buy now and save at Fandango]
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Assassin's Creed doesn't pull directly from any of the games in the series, instead telling a brand-new story set in a tweaked version of Ubisoft's game universe, penned by Macbeth's Michael Lesslie alongside the duo of Bill Collage and Adam Cooper responsible for Allegiant and Exodus: Gods and Kings. The lead character, Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender), is also newly created for the film, a late-thirties man on death row with a scarring past involving death in his family. Instead of meeting his end, he awakens in the depths of a high-tech facility owned by Abstergo, a science research corporation with a project dedicated to tapping into ancestral memories found within people's DNA, overseen and owned by Alan Rikkin (Jeremy Irons). Their interest in Callum has to do with his lineage, which becomes clear as he's strapped into an elaborate virtual-reality device, the Animus, and begins to live out the memories of Aguilar, a member of the Order of Assassins who furthered their pursuit of the Apple of Eden -- I know, bear with me -- in late-1400s Spain. It's this Apple of Eden, an ancient relic that manipulates the free will of others, that Abstergo, the corporate face of the Templars, hopes to locate in the modern era.
The juxtaposition of the slate-colored, sharp-angled Abstergo facility and the dusty earthiness of those sequences from historical Spain reveals that director Kurzel and his crew truly grasp how Assassin's Creed should look and feel. Granted, they've made changes to better suit the live-action medium, notably how they've turned the Animus device -- essentially a stationary VR rig in the games -- into a large, funky robotic-armed contraption that tracks Callum's real-time movements during the memories, which actually gives the lead actor
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When it comes to focusing on the characters, however, I suspect this new take on Assassin's Creed, a largely stone-faced and solemn affair, might have looked to the wrong installment in the game series as a point of reference. The first Assassin's Creed game may have gotten things moving, establishing the historical lore and the science and the assassination aspects, but there are certain elements that were "fixed" in its sequel that transformed the series into something a bit more enduring ... and the big one was introducing a second protagonist with a stronger personality than the first, someone with levity and exuberance. Callum Lynch didn't get that message, and neither did his historical counterpart, Aguilar: despite Michael Fassbender's chiseled, brooding features conveying the actor's signature depth and tragic tone, there aren't any breaks from the dark cloud hovering above him in either the past or the present. Fassbender is reliably solid, but perhaps too solid when surrounded by so much ill-omened conspiracy and death, all taken too seriously.
It doesn't help that Assassin's Creed abruptly hurls the audience into Callum's life, the functions of the enigmatic Order of Assassins, and the workings of the Abstergo facility -- with Kurzel's Lady Macbeth, an enigmatic and polished Marion Cotillard, as the scientist brains behind the project -- while the explanations that do drop into the film are the burdensome info-dump variety. The script suffers an anticipated but unfortunate fate for a video-game adaptation with a big
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As it progresses, Assassin's Creed yearns for the audience to grasp on messages about the balance between order versus chaos, control versus free will, while deciphering all the pieces of the puzzle scattered throughout Justin Kurzel's meticulously-crafted visuals and action. The ambition for this to become something bigger than the run-of-the-mill video-game movie can be clearly observed, yet the film cannot get in sync with that potential, unable to legitimize the preposterous sci-fantasy components enough to achieve that deeper impact. Instead, it delivers cursory entertainment with the tight, well-shot martial arts combat and the cat-and-mouse chases that have come to hallmark the Assassin's Creed franchise, with everything else being just coherent enough to make sense of where the film's ultimately headed and just convoluted enough to stay uninvested in the proceedings. For the pedigree of talent involved, it certainly was permitted to accomplish more than that.
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