Assassin’s Creed, an adaptation of the popular videogame, is a terrible film that doesn’t even have the decency to be bad in interesting ways. Though a writer, editor and director are all credited, it shows every sign of having been assembled by picking scenes at random from a hat and then bodging them together any-old-how. No film in recent memory so clearly screams: “Will this do?” The answer, should there be any doubt, is: “No.”
The mystery is that some outstanding people were involved in its making, people whose quality control has traditionally been high. The director Justin Kurzel made the terrifying serial-killer drama Snowtown and an impressive version of Macbeth. The latter starred Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, who also appear here. The impression is that there were a couple of weeks to spare at the end of the Macbeth shoot, and the three of them decided to rustle something up while they were kicking their heels. Certainly no one makes a film like Assassin’s Creed on purpose.
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