T’S Oscar season, so naturally we have Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Irons in . . . a video-game adaptation? Surprisingly and regrettably, yes. Fassbender stars as Callum Lynch (or “you,” perhaps, in a gaming situation), a convicted murderer rescued from lethal injection by a scientist (Cotillard) with a top-secret and very convoluted project involving past-life regression via virtual reality.
In practice, this means Callum is strapped into a giant mechanical arm that waves him around in the air while he “fights” the battles of his ancestor, a member of an elite band of assassins charged with not letting the Knights Templar get their hands on the apple of Eden — the prize Cotillard and her creepy father (Irons) have spent their careers searching for. It’s like a Dan Brown novel with a higher body count and an even lower IQ.
There will be fighting; there will be jumping from rooftops (so many rooftops!); there will be first-person crossbow-shooting vantage points. I’m sorry, I just bored myself to sleep writing that. As might be obvious, I’m not a gamer, so perhaps all of this will be thrilling for fans who’ve played it. The rest of us, I imagine, may come out of this film invigorated with a creed of our own: Avoid movies based on video games.
Running time: 115 minutes. Rated PG-13 (violence). Now playing. — Sara Stewart