The Games They Play

THERE IS something to be said about a movie plot where a creed linked to the “heretics” aka Arabs, living in the new Christian order being established by the Templars, is the keeper of mankind’s “free will”. This Assassin’s Creed comes to humanity’s rescue against the Templars, who believe man doesn’t want civil liberties anymore, but personal conveniences, and that freedom has never been less desired by the world.

However, don’t get your hopes up. That’s where all those interesting ideas stop, and a film looking to cash in on a successful video game franchise and to launching one of its own, takes over. Science is roped in for search of the ‘Apple of Eden’, as it holds the clues to “man’s first disobedience”. A serious scientist always dressed in warm turtle necks, Alan Raikkin (Irons), and his even more serious scientist daughter always in opennecked comfortable greys, Sophia (Cotillard), believe that the apple holds the answers to ending aggression, and “curing people of violence”. That the money for this exercise comes from the Templars, whose members go dressed about in cloaks and hoods, doesn’t raise any suspicion in Sophia, though she apparently has her concerns.

Callum (Fassbender) is among those violent sorts who has been roped in for their experiments by the Raikkins. Apparently, all people indulging in murders and such like could also belong to the Assassin’s Creed and, hence, be genetically tapped into for clues to their ancestors — via a Transformer-like machine invented by Sophia that is optimistically called Animus. One of those ancestors could then presumably lead to the apple. In Callum, they hit the jackpot as his ancestor was Aguilar, who in 1492, during the Spanish Inquisitions, is believed to have last had the apple. Callum falls into the Raikkins’ hands after being officially executed by the authorities for a murder.

Assassin’s Creed shuffles back and forth between the sepia-hued, dust-covered, and the guilt-free video-game-inspired universe of Spain of the 15th century, and modernday Madrid which we see nothing of except the concrete behemoth that the Raikkins run. At their ‘Abstergo Foundation’, the inmates hear constant messages over the public address system such as “progress is sacrifice”, “in quality, there is peace”, while men holding batons guard locked doors. You get the picture.

There are a few moments where Callum questions Abstergo’s methods “towards world peace”, given how people like him are used and discarded — though well fed, as the film curiously takes a pause to emphasise — but these are never taken to any serious conclusion. The film seems to believe that having men and women stand around in contemplative silence looking at glass walls is enough by way of intellectual curiosity. Is that the price Irons, Rampling and even a swiftly discarded Brendan Gleeson demanded for lending their thespian heft to the venture?

The fighting scenes can be impressive, though, and one shot of Aguilar and his equally competent fellow ‘assassin’, a beautiful woman who never gets a name, traipsing over clotheslines while ducking deadly arrows must make even God smile, at how humankind believes He works.

The dialogues can be funny. Just watch how Sophia exclaims, in a quiet whisper, always through perfectly painted red lips, “Leap of faith!” To be clear, Aguilar has just jumped into water, which he does a lot of, none of which evinces a similar exclamation from Sophia. But then, at the other end of that particular jump lies “Christopher Columbus”. Yes, that’s right. Finally, a Spaniard of 15th century we know, heading out, you know, for the New World, or if you like, the ‘free world’.

And, here is another “fact”. Addressing what suspiciously looks like the United Nations, Alan Raikkin puts “the economic impact of anti-social behaviour last year” at “nine trillion dollars”. Know a few people who could do with such convenient economics? AT THE heart of this animation from the makers of Despicable Me and The Secret Life of Pets is the insight, suggested early on, about how music lights up most of our days. Be it a stressed mother pig, Rosita (Witherspoon), with her 25 piglets; the gorilla son of a serial thief, Jonny (Egerton); the mouse originally from the ‘Lincoln School of Music’, Mike (Macfarlane); the porcupine with a domineering boyfriend, Ash (Johansson); and the shy elephant with the enormous talent, Meena (Kelly).

It’s, of course, guaranteed that each one of them will get their time in the limelight, in this city inhabited entirely by animals. And the film doesn’t try anything new getting them there, banking largely on tried cliches such as a singing contest, familiar hits, and messy situations which get easily resolved. However, who doesn’t like to watch a tired old mom or a repressed young son come unshackled