SECOND SCREEN

I’ve never played Assassin’s Creed (12A) but it’s got to be more fun than watching the extraordinarily tedious feature film that has now been adapted from the popular video game. At least in the game you get the sensation of doing the fighting yourself; in the film you just have to watch others doing it over and over (and over) again.

It’s all so disappointing, particularly as the last time director Justin Kurzel and actors Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard worked together it was on their highly regarded version of

Macbeth. More than anything, this feels like the sort of commercial hack-work that helps pay for such high-minded endeavours.

It also feels very old-fashioned, being set in the sort of cod-gothic world that was all the rage when the game came out almost a decade ago but now seems distinctly old-hat, what with the Knights Templar (yes, them again) and Assassin’s Creed locking horns in a battle that has, rather inevitably, echoed down the centuries.

Both sides are after the Apple of Eden, which apparently contains the genetic code for human free will but which seems to have got lost in the Moorish Spain of 1492. In the present day, a scientist (Cotillard) has invented a machine that allows assassins to change history. What this actually means is 21st-century bad-hats like Cal Lynch (Fassbender, right) get to do a lot of late 15th-century fighting.

What ensues is overcomplicated and uninvolving. With such a classy cast, no one is actively bad and a $125 m budget gives it an undeniable effect-driven visual gloss. But the line between good and evil seems poorly drawn, the violence unrelenting for a 12A film, and the underlying so-called science a load of old mumbojumbo.