Time killer

No movie based on a video game is worth a damn. But Assassin’s Creed never even rises to the level of “not worth a damn.” The picture is directed by Justin Kurzel and stars Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard; last year, the three worked together on the latest screen version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. They have literally gone from the sublime to the ridiculous.

And Assassin’s Creed is even more ridiculous than Shakespeare is sublime. The moronic plot involves the ancient conflict between the Knights Templar and the Assassins for control of the Apple of Eden, which contains “the seed of mankind’s first disobedience.” The movie opens in 1492, then swoops through 1986 before finally landing in 2016 with the execution of career criminal Callum Lynch (Fassbender). Lynch dies on the table, only to awaken to find Sofia Rikkin (Cotillard) bending over him. He is in the labyrinthine headquarters of an organization called Abstergo, and has been saved because he is descended from the Assassins. Sofia and her father Alan (Jeremy Irons in full Boris Karloff mode) hope to plumb Lynch’s genetic memories of an exploit back in 1492 when the Assassins gained control of the Apple of Eden. (That fruit must be getting pretty moldy by now.) By learning where the Assassins hid the apple, they aim to reprogram aggression out of the human race and “create a world free of violence.” Abstergo is really a front for the Knights Templar, whose idea of world peace is world control, while Assassins are the guardians of free will. Or something.

Not that it matters. Nor does naming the movie’s bad guys for an order of Christian crusader knights, while the heroic Assassins are clearly aligned with the Moors of medieval Spain; I’ll let some rabid conspiracy theorist speculate on that. Anyhow, it’s claptrap, courtesy of writers Michael Lesslie, Adam Cooper and Bill Collage (sharing blame, perhaps, with the game’s creators, Patrick Désilets, Corey May and Jade Raymond). Their script is so historically illiterate that it suggests Christopher Columbus knew he was sailing off to discover America. At one point, Alan Rikkin’s overseer Ellen Kaye (Charlotte Rampling) tells him, “The council feels that giving you $6 billion a year would be better spent elsewhere.” Yes, it’s true—these writers can’t put together a simple English sentence. (By the way, Jeremy Irons morphed into Karloff some 20 years ago, but when did Charlotte Rampling?)

Again, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about the video game action in Lynch’s genetic memories of 1492, accessed by strapping him into a machine called the Animus, which looks like a thrill ride in some theme park in one of Dante’s circles of hell. This unleashes not only the full catalog of CGI clichés but the cacophonous music of Jed Kurzel (who is about as good at his craft as his brother Justin is at directing).

If somebody wants to create a world without violence, a good first step would be to stop making movies like this.