Everything is permitted….including taking the p*ss.

It’s the first mini meh of 2017 and it’s still not about Rogue One! This is coming soon…. just as soon as I’m able to drag some others along to a showing against their will!

Instead of Star Wars or indeed the beginnings of Oscar Bait season 2017, we bring you a new meh about the film adaptation of the game everyone got really tired of, which is why Ubisoft made it finally take a year off, Assassin’s Creed. The games centered around Desmond Miles (voiced by the one and only Nolan North), who came from a long line of assassins, and some bad guys made him relive memories locked within his DNA from his ancestors. Of course over the series of games, we found it was based around alien ball things where the earth could be saved or not, along with various adventures into the past and present. So surely a decent enough premise for a half decent film?

Well, it is based on a video game, so the answer it seems is automatically no. Want evidence? Well let’s dive into this one and then you will see very quickly what I mean.

The film opens with a rather crap explanation of the parties involved with the plot and then in Spanish, we see lots of hooded people saw a lot of stuff about what they will do as Assassins. Instead of Desmond, we instead get to hang out with convicted criminal Callum Lynch (played by Michael Fassbender, who also has several other credits with this film so I guess we can blame him for something here). He is rescued from his own execution by Abstergo Industries (The bad guys, just stick with that for now) and they basically stick him into a giant robot arm thingy and then make him become a Spanish assassin dude who was the last chap ever recorded to find the piece of eden which can be used to control all of mankind.

How or why it does that or who made it? No-one f*cking cares as they never tell you. Don’t worry, there are more plot holes aplenty for those who never played the games. It’s slightly worse than what happened with Warcraft last year and that was hard going itself to follow. In fact, there’s one sentiment with Fassbender in the canteen, after being accosted by a bunch of fellow prisoner / weirdos, he just asks “What the f*ck is going on?” and that will pretty much sum up the film as a whole for a lot of you.

It doesn’t look like this thing is shoved up me arse, does it?

Which is a shame as there are some very good parts to this film, and they mostly involve the memory segments when Fassbender’s in the movie version of the Animus (the machine used to relive genetic memory) and reliving memories. At first it’s rather jarring to see, if you’re used to the game version of the same device but actually looks really really good in motion.

In fact, it’s actually a much more physical way to show what ol Fassbender is going through, and fun to see as he thinks he moves up buildings etc, but is just attached to the robotic arm. The fact that actual spanish is used as opposed to what they did in the games where everything was translated by the machine when replaying memories is a new touch and adds authenticity to proceedings. Well, as much as you can do for a sci-fi film.

There are other things which are only briefly touched on, that there is a bleed-in effect where Micheal ends up mastering Kung-Fu and all that thanks to the memories of his spanish assassin mojo. It’s a shame that they didn’t try to use more of the actual fist game’s plot as there would have been more than enough to create the film around, and may have been a much better way to explain and lead us into what goes on in the world. As it stands, they seem to have given the script to the same bunch of muppets that f*ck up every video game film, and therefore we only get a shadow of what it could have been.

The acting at times is dire and confusing. Hell there are scenes which go on, and you feel like you’re falling asleep. How did they make this boring? I’m not even sure if half the cast (Jeremy Irons and Marion Cotillard are especially guilty) were awake or were able to have more than one emotion as it’s about as phoned in as you can expect. Maybe they just needed to pay off a new TV or something? The other actors and actresses are alright, but honestly there are times when you wonder where they’re going with things and then you reach the point of not caring. The end is even more weird, which of course I won’t spoil here (the film was already spoiled by then anyway) but it’s really odd that Fassbender does what he does, when before…. well, you’ll see.

Please don’t see this at the cinema, only watch it when you’ve exhausted all the porn on the Internet and it just happens to show up on Netflix or Amazon. It was promising, only for it to be let down massively by a lack of care or indeed even attention to the main source material. God help anyone too, who has not played the games either.

Ubisoft, if you do actually make another, maybe refer back to your actual games? There was some good stuff in them, and you had some good bits in this. Just nowhere near enough to justify asking price at the box office.