Assassin’s Creed arrives with a pedigree that should have made it formidable: a director coming off a celebrated Shakespeare adaptation, a star who also produced, and a video game series with a decade of built-in mythology. What it delivers instead is a muddle — a film that cannot decide whether it wants to be a historical epic or a franchise starter, and ends up being neither.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
Callum Lynch and the Animus
The premise is straightforward enough. Callum “Cal” Lynch, played by Michael Fassbender, is a death row inmate whose execution is faked by the Abstergo Foundation. He wakes in a research facility in Madrid, where Dr. Sofia Rikkin, played by Marion Cotillard, puts him in the Animus — a machine that lets him relive the genetic memories of his ancestor Aguilar de Nerha, an Assassin active in 15th-century Spain.
The Templars want the Apple of Eden, an artifact built by a long-lost civilization. With its code, they believe they can control humanity’s free will and eliminate violence. Aguilar was the last person confirmed to have possessed it. So Cal relives Aguilar’s memories while Sofia and her scientists watch — hoping to learn where the Apple went.
Kurzel shoots the 1492 sequences with real texture. Aguilar and his partner María, played by Ariane Labed, are deployed to rescue Prince Ahmed of Granada from the Templar Grand Master Tomas de Torquemada. They intercept the Templars, and they are overpowered and captured by Torquemada’s enforcer, Ojeda. It is the film’s best stretch — concrete, physical, and free of the exposition that drags everywhere else.
Then Sofia pulls Cal out, and the film loses its nerve.
A Modern-Day Story That Never Coheres
The present-day material is where Assassin’s Creed should build its stakes. Instead it stalls. Cal meets other Assassin descendants held at the facility — Lin, descended from the 16th-century Chinese Assassin Shao Jun, and Moussa, descended from the 18th-century Haitian Assassin Baptiste. Most of the others are suspicious of him. He begins experiencing hallucinations the film calls “the Bleeding Effect,” of both Aguilar and his father Joseph, played by Brendan Gleeson.
Jeremy Irons plays Alan Rikkin, Abstergo’s CEO and Sofia’s father. Charlotte Rampling appears as Ellen Kaye. The cast is deep:
- Michael Fassbender as Callum Lynch and Aguilar de Nerha
- Marion Cotillard as Dr. Sofia Rikkin
- Jeremy Irons as Alan Rikkin
- Brendan Gleeson as Joseph Lynch
- Charlotte Rampling as Ellen Kaye
- Michael Kenneth Williams as Moussa
- Ariane Labed as María
None of them get enough to do. Cotillard has said Sofia’s relationship with her father is “twisted,” and that Sofia tries everything to “make him proud” while realizing they are not on the same page. That tension is the most interesting thing in the script. The film barely uses it.
Fassbender described Cal as “a bit of a lost soul,” someone who has “always been drifting in and out of correctional facilities,” and contrasted him with Aguilar, who “belongs to the Creed.” That is a real idea. The movie states it and moves on.
The Apple of Eden Problem
Assassin’s Creed was announced in October 2011. Fassbender joined in July 2012. Michael Lesslie was hired to write in January 2013; Adam Cooper and Bill Collage were brought in to rewrite in April 2014, around the time Kurzel entered talks to direct. The rest of the cast filled in between February and early August 2015. Photography ran from late August 2015 to January 2016.
That is a long development for a film this unsure of itself. The screenplay carries the fingerprints of too many hands: it explains its mythology constantly and dramatizes almost none of it. The Animus sequences should be the engine. Instead they are cutaways, and the modern-day facility — all gray corridors and vague menace — eats the runtime.
The film premiered at the AMC Empire 25 in New York City on December 13, 2016, opened in the United States on December 21, and reached the United Kingdom on January 1, 2017. It runs 116 minutes. It feels longer.
What Assassin’s Creed Gets Wrong
The core failure is structural. The film is set in the same universe as the Ubisoft games but tells an original story, and it never justifies that choice. Cal’s arc — accept your heritage, stop Abstergo — is stated in the first act and resolved in the last without much in between. The Templars want to end violence by erasing free will. That is a genuinely thorny idea, and the movie treats it as a switch to be flipped.
Kurzel can stage a chase. The 1492 material has weight, and Labed’s María makes an impression in limited time. But every time the film builds momentum, it yanks Cal back to Madrid for another round of explanation.
Assassin’s Creed is not a disaster. It is something worse for a franchise hopeful: forgettable. It has the cast, the budget, and the lore. What it lacks is a reason to exist beyond the logo.
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