Assassin's Creed review: Stunning visuals rescue a script penned by Reddit

This may be the best video game adaptation ever made - though that's not exactly saying much

Assassin's Creed has taken something of a long-needed vacation from the video game universe, after leaving fans increasingly disillusioned with the releases of both Unity and Syndicate.

Instead, these stiletto-knife wielding rogues have made the jump to screen - and what they deliver somehow ends up being exactly what you'd expect from the franchise. A film that, in turn, is both as exhilarating as Ezio making the Leap of Faith off Florence's Santa Maria del Fiore, and as frustrating as Assassin's Creed III's insistence you want to spend all your time improving your homestead as opposed to murdering Redcoats.

This cinematic iteration may conjure up a fresh protagonist in the guise of Michael Fassbender's Callum Lynch, but elsewhere fans will at least be pleased to find the DNA has remained largely intact; still, its key narrative sees an ancient conflict between Templars and Assassins over possession of the Apple of Eden - though its complex in-game history is here simplified to the singular notion it contains the genetic code for free will.

A convicted murderer seemingly executed by lethal injection, Cal suddenly finds himself the unwilling participant in Abstergo Industries' program to mine genetic memories; when he's strapped into a contraption entitled the Animus, he finds he's able to relive the memories of his ancestor Aguilar - a member of the Assassin's Creed during the Spanish Inquisition.

In fact, Assassin's Creed is faithful to the spirit of its origins to the point of reflecting its enduringly most tedious aspect: the feeling that every moment spent in the present day is but a dull interlude rushed through to return to the thrills of the past. The only problem here: that dull interlude is actually the majority of the film's running time.

Every time the eagle's cry signals those reversing sands of time, it's like being hit with a shot of adrenaline; or, indeed, the sensation of entering an entirely different film, one where director Justin Kurzel can fully step up to the plate as the visionary we saw back in 2015's Macbeth.

It's with the arid hues of 15th century Spain that Kurzel refines dusty aesthetics to the point of joyous mastery, saddled with a hardened conviction to keep pace with the film's nimble assassins, as sand flies and capes flutter past like a breath of smoke.

The film's centrepiece, which sees Aguilar and fellow assassin Maria (Ariane Labed) flee from the local guards, is breathlessly dynamic in its execution - seeing them scamper across rooftops and leap between banners hanging above the street level. Yes, there's slo-mo angles aplenty, but Kurzel is one of those rare directors who actually knows when to play those moments without breaking momentum.

Really, it's hard to think well of parkour when its mainstay in the cultural milieu has been that one scene in The US Office where they yell the word a lot while clambering over furniture, but it's here that Kurzel may have finally made the practice look sincerely cool. In short, it's one of the finest action sequences of the year.

Assassin's Creed's historical scenes are segregated too by the fact they're entirely in Spanish; which may seem a ludicrous risk for a major studio to take with a film, but it pays off beautifully - adding the necessary grit of authenticity to such wistful tales of creeds and brotherhoods. Yet, every time we return to the present, suddenly we're faced with the likes of:

“Why the aggression?”

“I'm an aggressive person.”

Yes, Spanish proves a saviour to Assassin's Creed's historical segments, because its English scenes are like a three-day festival of clunky dialogue.

Which is a shame, because the film isn't without an attempt to tackle fertile philosophical ground. Marion Cotillard's Abstergo scientist Sophia Rikkin, certainly, doesn't stride out like a token villain hellbent on controlling mankind - that's left to her father Alan (Jeremy Irons) - but offers sincere convictions that overruling free will would offer "the cure for violence" and ultimate peace.

It's exactly this kind of sinister methodology fuelled by seemingly well-intentioned motivation which hits harder in a universe of killers and manipulators, and specifically why it's Sophia who inevitably feels like the emotional crutch of the film.

The rest of this motley crew, meanwhile, seem far more interested in intellectual posturing than tackling any of these ideas head on; regurgitating a seemingly endless string of anti-establishment catchphrases that feels exactly like a particularly dodgy Reddit thread read out verbatim.

"Everything is permitted" is the Creed's catchy-as-hell slogan, as this film rages vaguely in the direction of consumerism and capitalism, while persisting the Creed are entirely immune to its hold because they don't bow down to 'the System'. It's not that these ideas are essentially misguided, but that their delivery is oversimplified to the point they have the intellectual clarity of your resentful 13-year-old brother.

Cal's antihero stripes push him dead into the middle of those toxic concepts of lone wolf masculinity: of aggression with no focus, violence with no morality. But, while the assumption would be his journey's purpose is to find an outlet within the ramshackle family of the Creed, this narrative spends far too much of its efforts glorifying his outsider status, and not enough in actually giving him an emotional arc to follow.

He's basically an antihero version of the Joker who, at one point, just decides to cut all pretence and start hysterically singing Patsy Cline's 'Crazy'. You get it? Because he's C-R-A-Z-Y.

Yet, for all the thrilling historical gameplay the Assassin's Creed franchise has provided, it's hard to say the film's source material has ever been much of a source of moral and philosophical treatises; not when the easier route has always been to play on the broadest outsider tropes and hope everyone's too distracted by the sticking-knives-into-people part of the deal to notice.

Assassin's Creed has probably done the very best it can with the hand it's been dealt with and, really, this might be the best video game adaptation yet. Mind you, that's not saying a huge amount.

Assassin's Creed is set for UK release 1 January 2017.