Assassin's Creed (2016) Review

Assassin's Creed is the 2016 film adaptation of the popular video game series of the same name, directed by Justin Kurzel, written by Michael Lesslie, Adam Cooper, and Bill Collage, and starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, and Jeremy Irons.

Plot Synopsis
Callum Lynch, played by Michael Fassbender, is rescued from his own execution for a murder crime by Abstergo Industries. Now he's forced to participate in the Animus Project, allowing him to relive long past memories of his ancestor Aguilar de Nerha, an assassin from the Spanish Inquisition, to find the powerful Apple of Eden.

Introduction
I was a bit curious of how they were going to be able to handle an Assassin's Creed film and another video game adaptation. The trailers for the movie didn't look the best, but I wanted to hold off my judgement until I actually saw the movie. Video-game-based movies are notorious for being low quality. So, does Assassin's Creed break the image of video game movies? I'm sad to say: no, no it doesn't.

The Positives
Starting off  with the positives, some of the action choreography is good and Michael Fassbender does steal some of the show and deliver a decent performance. However, those were the only positives to this movie.

The Negatives
This movie is BORING! And how is that possible? The games may not be the greatest things ever, but there is potential to deliver a fun-action packed movie. Yet, they absolutely fail in that department. Seriously, the film starts putting you to sleep as they go along. Also, the film's cinematography is so bland with an ugly color palette. The CGI is awful. Some of the action is poorly shot even though the choreography is decent. The film looks cheap, yet it's a 125 million dollar movie. What's even worse is that 90% of the movie is featured in the present-day, and the movie that is in the present-day is boring and we don't care about the characters. Why couldn't they just stick with the past? That's where the kinda-interesting stuff happens, but they barely have any of it here. And when the "kinda-interesting stuff" happens when the character is in the past, it literally just feels like a generic action sequence and there's no weight to the action because it's so disjointed because when the action is over, they just cut back to the boring present with the boring characters. I know in the game that some of the story is featured in the present-day and you have to go through the sequences that nobody cares for, but at least in the games, that is a small part in the games.  Did I also mention that the character composition sucks? We don't care that much for Michael Fassbender's character because he lacks depth and there's not much of a reason to like him. We don't care about Marion Cotillard's character because she's such an exposition machine. We don't care about Jeremy Iron's character because he's so generic. It's because there's no character development here, except Callum starts learning parkour and how to stab people, but nobody cares. And the plot is incoherent. And here's my favorite part. If you've seen the trailers of the movie, you've basically seen all the cool parts of the movie. Pretty much, almost everything has been spoiled to you already. Not that much interesting happens other than the stuff they showed us with the trailers and clips Fox has been posting on YouTube. Why is this movie called Assassin's Creed when the characters barely do any assassin stuff?

Conclusion
This movie sucks. Is it the worst film I've seen? No. It's arguably better than a lot of video game adaptations, but it's still not a good film. When I go to see a film, I want good character composition, plot, story, etc. This film, unfortunately, has none of those qualities. I appreciate Michael Fassbender because he looks like he tried to do something with the script, but the script is so awful, he only managed to look decent in the film.

Score: D-