Murderer Cal Lynch (Michael Fassbender) is taken by a secret organization of Templars to their lab run by Rikkin (Jeremy Irons). There, Rikkin’s daughter Sofia will use scientific hocus pocus to regress Lynch to his past life as the Assassin Aguilar (still Michael Fassbender). Sofia hopes to find the Apple of Eden, a MacGuffin that removes all freewill, and thereby end all violence and the everlasting war between the Templars and the Assassins, and Aguilar was the last known person to have it.
Assassin’s Creed was never going to be a great movie. Ignoring that it is based on a video game and video game movies tend not to do well, its basic structure dooms it: the film is split. All of the action is in the past with Aguilar, but we don’t know him. We’re told that the Apple is bad because it takes away freewill and that’s about it. Not shown, just told. So there’s a whole lot of fight scenes between people I didn’t know and didn’t care about for a thing that only matters because I was told it matters. In the present, Lynch doesn’t do anything. He’s angsty and talks a good deal to Sofia, but since the action is in the past, he’s just there between regressions. There’s no way to make that work.
Now, within the limits set by that structure, it could have been much worse. The action is well shot. The story, while far from gripping, at least makes sense. And Fassbender, who elevates everything he touches, makes it all respectable. I don’t know much about Lynch, but I care, a little, because Fassbender makes me care.
It could also have been better. Sofia’s personality is a whirling fog of confusion. Cotillard gazes and poses (ah, so much gazing) and there seems little connection between her expression and whatever emotion I’m guessing Sofia should feel. I’ve been unimpressed by her in other films, so I cannot tell if this was her failing or if the director kept telling her she was to feel one thing when the script was going another way.
The whole sci-fi angle was a mistake as well. They should have kept the regression as magic instead of DNA technobabble since that would have stopped me from asking questions that there are no answers to. But the biggest problem is how gloomy it is. If you are making a movie about super assassins fighting for an enchanted ball then maybe you shouldn’t pretend you are adapting a Russian novel. How to do you make this material pretentious? By its nature it should be fun, but Assassin’s Creed doesn’t want to be fun. It wants to be important, and it was never, ever, going to manage that.