Assassin’s Creed

I have never played the game version of Assassin’s Creed, but have heard a lot of positive feedback from those who are in to gaming. The plot of the game was interesting enough to create an interactive experience like gaming. But when it comes to the movie the wafer thin idea and its presentation look way too dull and with action sequences not really creating an excitement, Assassin’s creed is a letdown in many ways.

Callum Lynch is this convicted criminal who has been rescued from death sentence by the Abstergo Industries. He is put in to this set up called Animus, where he gets to see his ancestors who were assassins. They had a duty of protecting the Apple of Eden. Through Lynch Abstergo is trying to find out the Apple’s location as it possessed greater possibilities. Assassin’s Creed is actually this tussle between the Assassin’s Creed brotherhood and the Templar Order (Abstergo is its modern day version).

For those of you who are addicted to the game, your guy Desmond is not there in the movie and as you may already know, Callum Lynch is a character made up for the movie version. Games are largely successful on its game play factor. The script of this movie is struggling very much to create a story with depth and emotions. Even after taking almost 2 hours of runtime, the story hasn’t quite moved and it is lingering around the building up process of the character. There is a clever attempt to mix real incidents with the plot elements (inclusion of Christopher Columbus), but unfortunately that doesn’t work the way it did in the X Men series.

Michael Fassbender gets a character that at times reminds you of his own Magneto. He adds attitude to the character but a uniqueness to make Cal different was missing. Marion Cotillard neatly plays the good girl in the bad side. Other actors include names like Jeremy Irons, Brendon Gleeson and Michael K Williams.

Director Justin Kurzel is sort of left alone with a brittle plot. As a director he can’t really add any genuinely fresh takes to visualize this not so extraordinary structure of the story. As a concept, this rebirth and action set up is quite inviting, but setting it up for the viewers is a bigger challenge and the screenplay couldn’t achieve that. The stunts done for this film was much talked about, especially the leap of faith. But in the flow of the story, the stunts never really make you say wow about it (no offence to the stunt guy). Even in terms of dialogues, there isn’t any intellectual tone given to the content.

Assassin’s Creed is a movie that failed to elevate from the game level to a story that attracts you. The movie will possibly have sequels and I hope they would create more exciting content for the further projects.

Rating: 2/5