Assassin's Creed (2016)

There's a moment watching Assassin's Creed where you can actually feel the potential slipping through your fingers. The bones are all there. A genuinely intriguing premise about genetic memory, a lead actor in Michael Fassbender who is clearly giving this everything he's got, and a source material with a loyal fanbase desperate to see it done right. And then, scene by scene, choice by choice, the whole thing just collapses in on itself. It's not even a disappointingly average adaptation. It's a proper betrayal.

Fassbender plays Callum Lynch, a death-row inmate dragged into a modern corporate experiment that uses a machine called the Animus to tap into his ancestor's memories from 15th-century Spain. That ancestor, Aguilar, was an Assassin, and the corporation wants access to something he once possessed. On paper, that's a perfectly workable thriller setup, the kind of thing that could be a sleek, propulsive sci-fi action film or even something a bit more cerebral. What we get instead is neither. It's a rushed, lurching mess that can't decide what it wants to be, and ends up being none of those things properly.

The pacing is the first thing to go wrong, and it drags everything else down with it. The film barrels through world-building that desperately needs room to breathe, drops characters into scenes without any real foundation, and leans on dialogue so clunky it occasionally had me wincing. The whole Assassins versus Templars mythology, which in the games carries genuine philosophical weight, gets reduced here to vague speeches about free will and a MacGuffin shaped like an apple. It's surface-level stuff dressed up in portentous language, and it doesn't convince for a second.

What stings most is what they do with the historical sequences. The 15th-century Spain sections should be the film's heartbeat. The parkour, the period detail, the thrill of inhabiting a world that feels genuinely foreign and dangerous. Those sequences should make you feel something. Instead, they're treated almost as interruptions. You're yanked back to the sterile, grey modern-day facility so often that you never settle into Aguilar's story long enough to actually care about it. The emotional thread between past and present, which is the entire point of the Assassin's Creed concept, is just severed. Gone. The creed itself gets a single mention. One. And then the film moves on.

It's a genuinely puzzling waste of Fassbender's commitment. I've watched him bring magnetic intensity to roles that gave him much less to work with, and here, even when the script offers him nothing, he's still trying. I think back to his work in X-Men: First Class, where he had the charisma and the material to actually soar, and then look at what Assassin's Creed hands him: a character written in broad strokes, surrounded by people the film hasn't bothered to develop, in a story that ends on a note so deflating you'll wonder why you stuck around. By comparison, even X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), which had its own significant problems, at least gave Fassbender a genuinely moving scene or two to anchor himself to. Here, there's nothing to hold onto.

The film isn't incompetent in every single department. Visually, there are moments of real flair, and the production design for the Spanish sequences has genuine ambition behind it. But good-looking emptiness is still emptiness. When the action finally arrives in any meaningful way, it's choppy and hard to follow, and the iconic parkour that defines the franchise is barely a presence. It's as though the filmmakers understood the aesthetic of Assassin's Creed without understanding why any of it worked, or what it meant to the people who loved it.

Video game adaptations have a rough history, and Assassin's Creed had a genuine chance to change that. The concept is practically built for cinema. Instead, it joins the pile of projects that mistook a recognisable name for a solid foundation, rushed production to meet a release window, and ended up with something that pleases nobody, not fans, not newcomers, not even casual viewers looking for a decent action film on a Friday night. There's no emotional core here. No sense of stakes. No reason to invest.

One and a half stars. Stay in the Animus, Ubisoft. Hollywood clearly wasn't ready.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2016  | Watched: 2025-10-21

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