Assassin's Creed (2016)
Directed by Justin Kurzel
Through a technology that unlocks the genetic memories of his ancestor in 15th century Spain, Callum Lynch discovers he is a descendant of an ancient line of Assassins and amasses lethal skills to take on the oppressive Templar Order.
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28 films that influenced Assassin's Creed
What critics say influenced Assassin's Creed
20th Century Fox undoubtedly was interested, as it gives them a chance to try and tap into the huge popularity of those that played the video game, while it also has a vague merging of The Matrix and Game Of Thrones.
The effect of Aguilar daringly leaping from eave to eave isn't enhanced by watching Callum get hoisted around like a puppet any more than The Matrix would have benefited from lengthier shots of Neo lying supine on a bed.
As cold and weird as anything a major American studio has released since they started gearing all of their products for a Chinese audience — it borrows almost as much from “Under the Skin” as it does “The Matrix” — Kurzel’s film illustrates how free will can wiggle its way into the franchise system, how the messiness of bloodshed can be the only way to break free from the shackles of bloodlines.
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.
The result feels like a cross between The Matrix and a second-rate Dan Brown novel.
A collision between moody, smoky swords-and-daggers historical fantasy and sleek modern-day sci-fi, the overall dimension-shattering vibe is more like The Matrix.
Ya sabemos a lo que vamos cuando compramos un boleto para una adaptación de videojuegos: hay muy pocas posibilidades de revertir una maldición que se instaló con Super Mario Bros .
Not since the “Super Mario Bros.” film — with Dennis Hopper as a man-dinosaur and people turned into fungi — has a film gone so over and beyond to punch up a game too thin for the cinema.
Think cinematic disasters like Super Mario Bros., Wing Commander, Alone in the Dark and many others that have categorically cemented the near-impossibility of making a beloved video game property work as a narrative feature film.
While there’s the occasional win (“Wreck It Ralph”), this genre is awash with the critically reviled ( “Pixels” ) and box office losers (“Super Mario Bros.,” “Doom,” “Double Dragon”).
The setting—a public square, presided over by face-painted priests and royals and populated by a pious mob—is modeled after a Francisco Rizi painting but baked in the frenzied mold of Mad Max: Fury Road, with religious grotesques clamoring for the blood of heretics.
There have been a handful of mildly enjoyable ones though with Mortal Kombat and Warcraft: The Beginning, and guilty pleasures like Street Fighter and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
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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”).
There have been a handful of mildly enjoyable ones though with Mortal Kombat and Warcraft: The Beginning, and guilty pleasures like Street Fighter and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
While there’s the occasional win (“Wreck It Ralph”), this genre is awash with the critically reviled ( “Pixels” ) and box office losers (“Super Mario Bros.,” “Doom,” “Double Dragon”).
There have been a handful of mildly enjoyable ones though with Mortal Kombat and Warcraft: The Beginning, and guilty pleasures like Street Fighter and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
What lazier way is there to ignite the box office than to use established brands like Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed to draw in fans for easy money?
The kind of movie that opens with a wall of dopey text about an ancient grudge and the violence it makes possible for our viewing pleasure (like “Star Wars,” but slightly ashamed of itself), “Assassin’s Creed” begins during the Spanish Inquisition, where a man named Aguilar de Nerha (Fassbender, enjoyably terse) leads a secret brotherhood of killers as they plot to protect a relic called “The Apple of Eden” from the rival Knights Templar.
Unless a movie is part of the Star Wars franchise, it’s generally a bad sign to open with an expository text crawl, and Assassin’s Creed never stops expositing over its entire dragged-out runtime.
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Super Mario Bros. tenía esos saltos horribles que emulaban los ataques del juego, Resident Evil tuvo los sustos espontáneos de zombies escondidos –y, claro, perritos infectados–, y Mortal Kombat jugaba con la música, las tomas laterales y los combates ascendentes.
To be fair, I said the same thing about Warcraft, and the first Resident Evil, the first Silent Hill movie, Prince of Persia, and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and so on and so forth.
Sorting out the hows and whys of Knights, Assassins, apples, and Jeremy Irons would be less of a concern (or chore) if Kurzel made the movie a distinctive visual experience, like the better Resident Evil and Underworld movies.
If you do like Paul WS Anderson movies — movies like Resident Evil and Pompeii — you might like Assassin’s Creed.
“Assassin’s Creed,” based on an apparently popular series of video games, purports to say something about the importance of free will against enforced conformity—as “A Clockwork Orange” so memorably did.
But this video-game nihilism also offers an Orwellian cautionary tale — A Clockwork Orange morphs into Minority Report and Ghost Rider with a constantly moving camera, cross-cut parkour fighting, furious action, and a relentless exercise in montage.
This narrative imbalance is one of the film’s biggest issues – so much time is spent in the facility that it feels like Kurtzel would have rather made a meditative science fiction piece about incarceration and aggression, in the style of A Clockwork Orange or One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and found himself having to work in an Assassin’s Creed movie.