12
Slant Magazine by Aaron Riccio
The film ends up with both blurry action that often looks digitally faked and a fractious plot that’s stuck over-explaining itself.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
Time Out London by Dave Calhoun
The relentless gloom can feel oppressive, but there’s plenty of ambition here, especially in the layered storytelling and woozy sense of time and place, with plenty of soaring aerial shots that nod quietly to the all-seeing eye of a computer game.
67
Declaring Assassin’s Creed to be the best video game movie ever made is the kind of backhanded compliment that sounds like hyperbole, but the description fits the bill on both counts. Regardless of what you call this peculiar, arrestingly uninviting nonsense, the fact of the matter is that it’s the only blockbuster of 2016 that left me desperate for a sequel.
30
The Hollywood Reporter by Harry Windsor
Assassin’s Creed is resolutely stone-faced, ditching the humdrum quips that are par for the course in today's blockbusters. But this is almost two hours of convoluted hokum that might have benefited from a few self-deflating jabs.
60
Valiant, but flawed. Some of the set-pieces are superb, but there isn’t enough meat on the bones to turn this into a classic.
42
The Playlist by Kenji Fujishima
It’s all window-dressing for an ending that reveals this alternately goofy and self-serious big-budget Hollywood product to be little more than a two-hour prelude to a potential future franchise.
30
The plot is that most dreadful of mixes: both laughably silly and needlessly complicated.
40
In Assassin’s Creed, Michael Fassbender is like the ultimate special effect. Just by showing up, he confers respectability on two hours of semi-coherent overly art-directed video-game sludge.
20
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
It’s rare to see a film quite so lacking in animus. It exists only to gouge money out of gamers. They might well want to stick to the game.
30
Assassin’s Creed the movie is fairly innocuous. It’s also cheerless and dumb.