Film reviews round-up: Monster Trucks, Assassin's Creed, Crash & Burn

Another crack at breaking the video game curse, a bizarrely premised fantasy film, and a documentary on an Irish racing driver

Lucas Till stars in the jaw-droppingly bizarre film ‘Monster Trucks’

Assassin’s Creed (12A)

★★☆☆☆

Dir: Justin Kurzel, 115 mins, starring: Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Essie Davis, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson

“You don’t ever have to have played the game in order to enjoy the movie,” the producers of Assassin’s Creed claim. In fact, for the non-initiates, the film is utterly baffling. It bombards us with information and flits in confusing fashion from 15th century Spain to the present day. The data overload is a problem in a movie that can’t work out whether it is a swashbuckling romp or a dystopian sci-fi drama.

Cal (Michael Fassbender) is a convict facing death by lethal injection. He’s traumatised by an act of extreme violence he witnessed when he was still a kid, jumping off rooftops on his Raleigh Chopper. Thirty years on, he has become a career criminal.

Marion Cotillard plays scientist Sophia Rikkin, who plucks him back from the abyss after his death row experience. She is an idealist but her father, Alan Rikkin (Jeremy Irons), is a billionaire industrialist with a very ruthless streak.

Fassbender (who also produced) plays Cal in much the same way as he did Macbeth – that’s to say, he glowers and looks moody. Sophia and her fellow scientists tie him up to an electronic gurney that somehow whisks him back 600 years into the past, when he was an assassin called Aguilar, fighting against the Knights Templar.

The jumps between present and past are jolting in the extreme. It is hard to work out what is going on or why. The assassins may dwell in the dark but they apparently serve the light. Rikkin may have plans to end human aggression and violence – but he has no compunctions about stripping away free will and any last vestige of political freedom in the process.

As in Macbeth, director Kurzel brings a dark intensity to the battle scenes. He doesn't just rely on the CGI either. There are some tremendous, old fashioned chases on horseback and fights on top of wagons as the assassins and officers of the Knights Templar tear strips off one another.

In its own grisly way, the filmmaking is quite stylish – witness the macabre early scene in which an assassin's victim is found slumped at the kitchen table as Patsy Cline music plays on the radio. The pounding metronomic music adds to the tension.

Assassin’s Creed is more of a “proper” film than most other big screen spin-offs from computer games. At least it tries to provide its characters with a back story and some psychological motivation beyond the cartoonish desire to kill. In the film’s depiction of the tensions between the Christians and the Islamic world, there are obvious (albeit glib and under explored) parallels with the current “war on terror”.

Nonetheless, the actors are given very little to work with. Brendan Gleeson is wasted as Cal's grumpy Irish dad. Charlotte Rampling has a thankless role as the M-like head of the secret network of the Templars. Marion Cotillard's brilliant but conflicted scientist is the type of character generally found in a low budget sci fi movie.

Absurd rooftop escapes by helicopter and cryptic references to secret orders and to the “apple of Eden” evoke unfortunate memories of dismal recent Dan Brown adaptations.

Monster Trucks (PG)

★★☆☆☆

Dir: Chris Wedge, 105 mins, starring: Lucas Till, Jane Levy, Thomas Lennon, Holt McCallany, Samara Weaving, Aliyah O’Brien

Monster Trucks is a jaw-droppingly bizarre film which fully lives up to its title. This isn’t just a story about very big pick up vehicles with huge wheels and souped-up engines. It’s a film about very big pick-up vehicles that actually have very big monsters inside them - metal crunching, friendly, Nessie-like creatures with dolphin teeth who dwell in happy seclusion deep beneath the earth’s surface - at least until they are victimised by big, bad oil company, Terravex.

Lucas Till stars as Tripp, the preening, narcissistic James Dean-like high school student, a rebel with a spanner whose pet hobby is tinkering with machinery. He chafes against small town life and is full of contempt for his stepfather.

Jane Levy is Meredith, his bookish but glamorous fellow student who has a monster-sized crush on him. He’s too busy fiddling with engines to notice her interest in him. For reasons that seem a little random even in an escapist yarn like this, one of the creatures takes up residence in the hood of his truck. With its tentacles, the monster can make the truck go much, much faster than regular vehicles.

Director Chris Wedge (better known for animated fare like Ice Age than for live action) tackles an absurd story in gleefully energetic fashion. In its own demolition derby-like way, the film has a certain outlandish charm. Its script, though, makes no sense whatsoever.

This is at once a love story, a coming of age yarn, an eco-fable - and a harum scarum chase movie involving trucks propelled by Fungus the Bogeyman-like blobs who metabolise oil.The target audience is hard to identify.

Is the film aimed at kids or car loving adults? Why do Tripp and Meredith treat their overweight classmate with such contempt? What purpose do the cameos from Danny Glover and Rob Lowe actually serve? These are mysteries that are never resolved.

Crash & Burn (15)

★★★☆☆

Dir: Seán Ó Cualáin, 86 mins, featuring: Tommy Byrne, John Watson, Eddie Jordan

“I just got beat, I got beat by the system,” Irish racing driver Tommy Byrne bemoans his lot at the beginning of Seán Ó Cualáin’s entertaining documentary. If ability had been the measure, Byrne would surely have been up there with Prost and Senna as one of the top Formula One stars of his era.

Instead, he has spent the past 20 years working as an instructor in a high performance driving school in the US and bemoaning his failure to make it. As a young driver, he was a “raw, ragamuffin chancer” with no wealthy benefactor behind him.

Some argue that Byrne sabotaged his own career with his drinking, womanising, pilfering and generally reckless behaviour. Others suggest that he was mistreated because he was a fiery, indigent Irishman from a very humble background in Dundalk.

Sponsors and Formula 1 team bosses felt that his face simply didn’t fit. Whatever the case, he’s an excellent subject for a film – full of colourful anecdotes about his excesses and brattish behaviour but perplexed and pained by his own failure to make the millions that Ayrton Senna did. His bitterness is apparent but he looks back on his misadventures with an engaging, self-mocking fatalism.