Assassin's Creed

It’s no fan service and it goes hard toward even the most welcoming viewer. It’s a non-Hollywood adaptation that mercilessly flushed over a hundred million and had no shame in doing so. It’s visually captivating bliss that tests the projectionists and the limits of how much the viewer is willing to accept the creative rules. (30/12/2016)

I was looking forward to this movie, but it turned out to be a huge disappointment. I've played Assassin’s Creed, and I think it's definitely a top-quality game, but the filmmakers stripped away the best parts, threw them away, and served us some weird leftovers. In the game, I was annoyed by the flash-forwards. The plot of the film takes place practically entirely in the future and only occasionally ventures into the past, which was a let down for me. I was expecting something completely different, thus I was far from entertained. (14/06/2017)

An interesting, artistically ambitious attempt. Visually, it’s similarly "black and white" and artfully polished as anything from Nolan or Spectre. But the script is gibberish and buries the personality and confident direction the creators were pursuing. The parkour is fine, and so is 15th century Spain, but everything in the present is rubbish. And in this case, I'm afraid that, unlike Warcraft, the players of this famous game won't be excited about the film adaptation. (07/01/2017)

Even a stupid story can be told in a way that doesn't make sense. An unbearably long two-hour apple game, which sometimes disrupts a successful parkour and a scene that reveals that Kurzel thinks of it artistically, but completely counterproductive for a blockbuster. It is difficult to say whether the smooth transitions between history and the present represent any sophisticated commentary on the art of the Gamer experience. I don't have the strength to find out. The screenplay is horribly annoying, the characters have no inner logic and the storytelling has no cadence. I was expecting a cleansing surge of Gamer ecstasy, but this leap of faith ended in a complicated fracture. (21/12/2016)

Well, it's not a good film, but in the end it's not a complete disaster either. Assassin's Creed alternates above average and sometimes almost great moments with moments when I almost felt sorry for the filmmakers. What goes well? Definitely the action, or rather almost everything from the past. The battles are quick, fairly straightforward and brisk, and at least the part where two of the heroes are running away from an entire city really hit the spot. The scenes of Spain being terrorised by the Inquisition do show the money, and the costumes, the production design and the visual effects look more than good too. Unfortunately, everything that takes place in the present is more or less ugly and terribly boring. I've played almost all of the games, and from the very beginning, these passages annoyed me. In the film, the uninteresting present takes up two-thirds of the running time. Most of the cast act like they weren't told what was wanted of them, it doesn't make any sense at all at times, and unfortunately Assassin's Creed is unaware of its stupidity and simplicity (nothing against it, I love it) and tries to pretend to be something more than a simple blockbuster. And it's not very good at it. In a few years, someone will edit a nice 20-minute video out of it with good action and nice sets. In the meantime, we have a movie that is boring most of the time or tries in vain to fulfill the ambitions of someone in the background who didn't understand that he was making an action movie. And those have to be entertaining first and foremost. (15/05/2017)