Review of Assassin's Creed (2016) by Lenny R — 01 Feb 2017

Too much present-day, outside-the-Animus expository stuff (an annoying interruption in the games) and nowhere near enough historical, in-Animus assassinatory stuff. And what action there is is murky, overedited and shot way too close, plus it's intercut with present-day Fass being thrown around by a robot arm fighting faint memory holograms, pulling us out of the action and making the whole thing a mess. This is a prime example of why a good, story-driven game makes a bad movie; games are able to expand the story over hours and hours of gameplay, while a movie has to stick to a runtime of a couple of hours, meaning it's impossible to adapt the complete story AND include all the necessary action to make it fun.

And that's what it really comes down to here; this movie is NOT FUN. It's serious discussions by serious actors about absurd pseudoscientific macguffin stuff. In the games, that stuff is there, but it's spaced out between cool assassination missions - the focus of the games, the reason people play the games. Or, at least, the reason I play the games. I wanted smooth, flowing parkour and lots of medieval murders. I got about half an hour of...well, something resembling that, and the rest of the time I was bored.

I don't walk out of movies, especially when I've paid $24 to see them, but I considered it with this. I felt disappointed, but afterwards I wondered what else I should have expected from a two-hour Assassin's Creed movie. It makes me hope like hell they never get the Uncharted movie off the ground.

Plus, I just don't like Jeremy Irons.