The video-game-to-movie model has a 20-odd year history now, but there isn’t a “respectable” movie in the catalogue. The best you can hope for is something that has a diverting kinda fannish fun – for me, the “Resident Evil” series is the standard, throwing hyperprocessed action, Mila Jovavich in skimpy clothing , hordes of zombie creatures and a half-baked conglomeration of game lore at the audience. You might get a few thrills here and there, but you’re probably not going to learn anything particularly deep about the human condition, beyond “hey, evil corporations sure are evil”.
“Assassin’s Creed” doesn’t even get there on the surface fun level. Justin Kurzel’s film has a top level cast (the poster boasts three Oscar winners or nominees, and actors as qualified as Charlotte Rampling, Brendan Gleeson and Michael K. Williams shows up for additional actor cred) but none of them are playing characters with any depth beyond the surface “heroic assassin”, “corporate baddy”, “scientist lady”. The plot is a fairly dull trudge through a storyline that feels awfully generic, and never really has the true joy that an insane plot about genetic blood memory, mystic artefacts and world dominating corporations really should have. The parkour –heavy fighting action that has made the games a franchise reliable here feel like every other action movie we’ve seen in the last decade or so from Bond to Bourne, and Kurzel’s fondness for smoke and grey filters just means we get an oppressive-looking dour drone of a film (this didn’t help his “Macbeth” much either).
I do not mind stupidity in a movie. I do mind being bored. I was desperately bored by this film, and it never really rose above the run-of-the-mill.
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