Just by showing up, he confers respectability on two hours of semi-coherent overly art-directed video-game sludge.Ĭallum has been saved from death by Alan Rikkin (Jeremy Irons), a mysterious CEO so lost in time that he still wears a black turtleneck, and his daughter, Sophia ( Marion Cotillard), who is the lead scientist at Rikkin’s company, Abstergo Industries. His every tragic gaze and saturnine grimace tells the audience that this isn’t just some glorified dystopian joystick ride - it’s real drama! Except that it isn’t. In “Assassin’s Creed,” Michael Fassbender is like the ultimate special effect. Fassbender takes on the role of Callum Lynch, a modern-day criminal saved from execution and forced to enter the memories of an Inquisition-era Assassin, as if he were playing Neo from “The Matrix” crossed with Hamlet. Shot in somber sci-fi Renaissance tones, “Assassin’s Creed” has a “Masterpiece Theatre” cast that’s ten times classier than it needs, it cost more than $150 million to make, and it’s deeply self-serious about its long-ago-and-far-away setting: 15th-century Spain during the Inquisition, which means a lot of solemn religious dogma and burning at the stake.

The hook the producers are selling is, “Here, at long last, is a video-game movie that’s a cut above the others.”

But “Assassin’s Creed” isn’t fighting the junkiness of that pedigree - it’s using it to prop up its own pretensions. The film is coming off 20 years of soullessly trashy and forgettable video-game spinoffs (the “Mortal Kombat” and “Streetfighter” films, “Max Payne” and “BloodRayne,” the “Lara Croft” series, this year’s “Warcraft”).

“Assassin’s Creed,” in which Michael Fassbender plays some sort of leaping, fighting, time-tripping - but still moody and sullen - bare-chested historic warrior dude, is a mediocre video-game movie that has branded itself in a most revealing way. When Laurence Olivier played a leering rapacious soap-opera gloss on Henry Ford in Harold Robbins’ “The Betsy” (1978), or when Michael Caine gallivanted around the globe to star in paycheck movies from “Blame It On Rio” to “Jaws: The Revenge,” no one was fooling anybody. It used to be that when a highly touted actor - a prestigious actor, a thespian - agreed to star in a piece of schlock, he might be grateful for the work, but the job was still undertaken with a pinch of shame.

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