Well, that\'s incredibly rude. You\'re allowed to not like the film, but saying that we\'re lying when we say we enjoy it... well, that\'s utterly rude.
Aw geez.
I wasn\'t trying to be rude, although reading this back, I can definitely see that vibe. It\'s more - oh God this is just going to sound even worse - you can like something and it can also be, quote, a pile of dreck, unquote? I fucking love The Room, and there\'s a plethora of So Bad It\'s Good entertainment out there, and outside of that plethora then I like plenty of outright terrible things too.
I\'m not trying to say \'If you like this movie then you are lying to yourself!\' but to be brutally honest I am completely comfortable saying \'If you think that this is, all things considered, a GOOD movie, then I would happily call that a lie and argue my case.\'
Well, I can understand. It\'s not a lie that I enjoy this un-ironically, but your opinion is indeed respectable. I can understand what you were trying to say.
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A Tediously Bad Cutscene
I won't mince words; this is one of the worst films that I've ever seen.
The plot opens, as all good stories do, with white text on a black screen. It briefly explains 'Templars = Evil. Assassins = Good.' And then we meet our hero, Callum. As a kid, his mother dies, and then he's an adult and he's being sentenced to death for something, and then he's at Abstergo. This is as close as he ever gets to having a personality. I'm not kidding. For all I know this was filmed with a Michael Fassbender cardboard cutout that was somehow also CGI.
But the problem isn't just Michael, it's everyone. Every character in this film is utterly devoid of personality. Callum is the most noticeable case by far as he's the main character, but the villains, past and present, are evil, bland, and boring. Sophia might be the worst character because she seems to have a revelation that maybe the Templars are bad and she gets angry that they misused her work or lied to her or something, but... look Sophia, you've had thirty fucking years of being a Templar to figure out that being a Templar is bad. How did spending a few days with a man who has the personality of a dead snail change your entire belief system?
There's also a pointless 'We don't need the Apple of Eden, because society and consumerism have defeated the people!' scene that never comes up again and only exists to give the film false depth with some wanky pretentious attempt at social commentary.
There really aren't any highlights, but there are moments where the badness is limited. While he doesn't deserve fourth billing for one scene, Brendan Gleeson shows everyone up by actually acting. The action scenes are alright, although it's hard to care when you're not invested in any of the events. The parkour is honestly very impressive, and the visual effects are great. The chase in the second Animus sequence is a big positive.
But the garbage is just too frequent for me to salvage anything from this. There isn't a single line of dialogue that isn't cringeworthy and unnatural - like they didn't know what they wanted to use in the trailer until they made the whole movie, so every single line is trying to be deep or thematic - and characters with no names go on monologues for no reason that don't fit with what little personality they're supposed to have. The nameless head of the Abstergo security forces tells Callum about how much he respects the assassins, for no reason at all, before the final Animus trip. He also watches Cal perform a mixture of yoga and invisible hadoukens in his cell and says, dead-faced 'We're feeding the beast.' It's bad, but not funny-bad.
So all in all, underdeveloped plot, characters that would be lucky to be described as one-dimensional, and painful dialogue, broken up by several long tracking shots of eagles. When they say 'Nothing is true', in the Creed of the Assassins, they're referring to positive reviews of this pile of dreck.