Director Justin Kurzel’s primal, blood-drenched assault on Macbeth in 2015 marked him out as a good fit to bring the computer game Assassin’s Creed to the big screen. He’s both an aggressive visual stylist and a propulsive storyteller. However, as Duncan Jones demonstrated with Warcraft last year, in computer game adaptations, the talent of the director – and both Jones and Kurzel are unquestionably talented – is of secondary importance if the screenplay doesn’t work.
Kurzel is particularly poorly served. The script is filled with logical leaps as reckless as any of the medieval parkour that sends the key characters scurrying over terracotta-tiled rooftops. With its portentous, declamatory dialogue and sound design perpetually cluttered with the crash of battle drums and clashing swords, it feels like a Dan Brown movie hopped up on a cocktail of steroids and mescaline.
Kurzel reunites with several of his Macbeth collaborators. Michael Fassbender plays Cal Lynch, a death row convict saved from execution to participate in an experiment that taps into his past lives. Marion Cotillard is Sofia Rikkin, the idealistic scientist hoping to find a “cure for violence” through her ambitious Animus project. Cal – or rather, his Spanish Inquisition-era ancestor, Aguilar de Nerha – is of crucial importance to the project. Hidden in his memory is the location of the artefact with which the Knights Templar hope to control the free will of humanity.
All the pyrotechnics, which include suspending a semi-naked Fassbender in midair, dangling from a hydraulic arm, are not enough to distract from the fact that this is preposterous, under-plotted and surprisingly dull.
