"Assassin's Creed" Review

The inherent problem with movies based on video games is that, by the nature of the medium, a movie makes a passive narrative out of an active one. For anyone who's played the Assassin's Creed video games, who can deny the thrill of scaling Renaissance architecture or the sweaty-palmed excitement of your first "leap of faith?" These are seminal moments that have made Assassin's Creed a hallmark of developer Ubisoft's oeuvre. The results of this highly-anticipated, game-to-screen translation are, perhaps unsurprisingly, decidedly average.

Featuring most of the same creative team behind last year's astounding Macbeth, Assassin's Creed seemed to be a surefire hit in the making. Director Justin Kurzel tries too hard to elevate the material to some twisted form of higher art. I found myself growing more and more exhausted as the film went on and thought that its biggest sin was self-seriousness. But then I remembered that the games - aside from some silly dialogue with the Florentines in Assassin's Creed II - are kind of the same way. Going back to the inherent flaw of video game movies, it's one thing to take part in a self-serious slog yourself. It's entirely different to be forced to sit idly as one plays out in front of you. Not even solid acting - of which there is plenty here - can save an absurdist plot that doesn't know when to embrace its silliness.

Michael Fassbender plays Callum Lynch, an entirely new hero in the franchise. He is the direct descendant of Aguilar de Nerha (also Fassbender), a 15th century assassin working to overthrow Templar rule during the first years of the Spanish Inquisition. The connection between Cal and Aguilar is amplified by the Animus, a device that synchronizes his senses and memories with those of his ancestor. Through this connection, Abstergo Industries hopes to find the location of the Apple of Eden - a device that many believe contains the key to free will. Sofia Rikkin (Marion Cotillard) is in charge of the Animus project and hopes to use the Apple of Eden as a cure for violence. Her father Alan (Jeremy Irons) wants it for more nefarious purposes.

Even with a cast of star thespians, the Abstergo scenes are far less interesting than the action sequences with Aguilar. It's no secret that the stunt work on this film has been some of the most ambitious in cinema history. The "leap of faith" sequences alone required the highest controlled free falls ever attempted on a movie set. Kurzel should have given the action more room to breathe, though. Too much of the stunt work is masked by editing save for a climactic confrontation between Aguilar and Templar forces inside a temple. There's an electrifying shot with fellow assassin Maria (Ariane Labed) beating down several enemies with a few quick strikes from her gauntlet blades. Later in the scene, we get a brutal hand-to-hand fight sequence between Aguilar and Ojeda (Hovik Keuchkerian), a Templar henchman. With the games chock full of R-rated content, I was worried that the film's PG-13 rating may ruin it. Thankfully that wasn't the case. Buckets of CGI blood would've contributed nothing of any of the violent sequences.

Another thing I liked very much about the Aguilar scenes were that they were presented entirely in the Spanish language. I've always found the games slightly absurd for their adherence to the English language. In Assassin's Creed II, t's hilarious to listen to Leonardo Da Vinci speak with a British accent in Florence, Italy. Other side characters do the same during the French Revolution in Assassin's Creed: Unity. All characters in the film spoke Spanish when the setting required it, making the action feel more authentic. Great creative decision by the director and screenwriters.

The last fifteen or so minutes of the film present a clever, somewhat full-circle way to marry the Abstergo scenes with the more exciting assassin sequences. Overall though, It's too bad that Assassin's Creed revels in the more laconic aspects of the video game campaigns. Nobody plays the games for those scenes with Kristen Bell.

The ball's in your court now, Uncharted.

C

Trailer Round-Up (Week of 10/21/16)

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WhQcK-Zaok

Logan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Div0iP65aZo

Assassin's Creed - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4haJD6W136c

A Cure for Wellness - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mcVodJmBlU

"Warcraft" Review

The spawn of the late David Bowie just made a live-action movie out of arguably the most popular MMORPG video game ever created. Filmmaker Duncan Jones has a proven track record of marvelous independent work, such as MOON with Sam Rockwell and Source Code with Jake Gyllenhaal. His first foray into studio filmmaking is something of a beautiful disaster. Warcraft isn't nearly as awful as the mainstream critics would have you believe; there are some visual cues here that signify the hand of a director who knows what he's doing. The problem is that Jones (but moreso perhaps Universal and Legendary) can't make the human characters work, which is frankly shocking for a storyteller whose previous work suggests he's a master at crafting compelling human drama. For better and for worse, Warcraft often feels like an indie movie trapped in a blockbuster's body. This is a fantasy that feels at once both intimate and epic, but poor editing and uninspired performances largely keep Warcraft from confidently bursting the bad video-game-to-movie bubble.

The story that Jones and his co-writers Charles Leavitt and Chris Metzen takes its cues naturally from the lore of the game itself, which fans are sure to love. Humans and orcs have been at odds for centuries. Now, the leader of the Horde is Gol'dan (voiced by Daniel Wu), a mage of sorts who wields a deadly power called "the fell." Everywhere Gol'dan and the Horde go, everything around them dies, even the orcs' own home world. Faced with extinction, the orcs open a portal to the human realm with the expectation that they'll kill all the humans and make a new home. The humans operate under the banner of the Alliance in a nearby kingdom. Their bravest warrior, Lothar (Vikings' Travis Fimmel), leads an army under the command of King Llane (Dominic Cooper). When Lothar discovers that the orc threat will not be defeated by humans alone, he enlists the help of a powerful young mage Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer), the guardian of the human realm Medivh (Ben Foster), and a beautiful half human-half orc named Garona (Paula Patton).

Now the kicker is that there are orcs who see the error of Gol'dan's ways and decide that the best way to defeat him and save their kind is to team up with the humans. Durotan (voiced by Toby Kebbell) and his band of orcs befriend Lothar knowing that Gol'dan won't stand a chance against their unified strength.

If that all sounds a bit nerdy, trust me... it is. But as I sit here typing, I recall that the film has a modest share of twists and turns that buck traditional franchise formula, at least in Marvel's sense of the word these days. Granted, to speak on them would be to court massive spoilers, and we don't want that.

I will say, however, that I was surprised at how much more compelling the orcs were than the humans. Kebbell does a stellar job with motion capture and voice acting for Durotan. The trailers made this movie look like a montage of bad CGI in a movie that would play out like one long video-game cutscene. Turns out, the CGI is really solid, inasmuch as  the orcs themselves actually look like living, breathing characters. This makes the violence feel much more brutal. There are some gnarly stabbings, slashings and decapitations that spray green blood on the camera lens here and there. Pretty intense for PG-13 but so was Lord of the Rings.

The film also never feels like a cutscene from a video game. It always feels like a "movie," or if the humans are talking to each other, a medieval soap opera.

Seriously, as good as the orcs and the CGI are, the humans are really a drag to watch. I think Fimmel and Foster are horribly miscast. Fimmel proves incapable of carrying a potential franchise at this stage in his career. He mumbles nearly every word and has about as much leading-man charisma as a sack of rocks. Foster gives his all but manages to be impossible to take seriously as "the guardian of the human realm." Maybe it's the Gandalf hairpiece? Patton and Cooper are tolerable; any scenes with them are made better by their presence, but the material they've got to work with is just not very engaging.

The other big problem I had with Warcraft probably isn't Jones' fault. When you make a big tentpole film like this for major studios like Universal and Legendary, who specialize in this sort of cinematic spectacle, your art becomes a regulated commodity. It has to fit into a certain hole in order to appease investors. When that happens, "final cut" is usually taken away from the filmmakers and given to the businessmen who don't really know what good art is supposed to look like. That said, this movie is cut to shit with poorly placed edits everywhere. Some scenes feel cut short while others feel out of place entirely. It's a shame to think how much better this movie might have been if Jones had full creative control. As it stands, the film doesn't quite have enough good to entirely offset the bad. Warcraft surprised me in ways that you'll probably have to see for yourself in order to completely understand. It's not a complete disaster, but it won't be Jones' first film in The Criterion Collection either.

C

"Ratchet & Clank" Review

Ratchet & Clank is based on the series of popular PlayStation video games. Rainmaker Entertainment worked in conjunction with developer Insomniac Games and Sony Computer Entertainment to produce this new presentation of the characters' origins. Gramercy Pictures distributes. Fans will be delighted to know that the core voice talent from the original games reprise their roles here with some recognizable Hollywood names rounding out the cast.

The Ratchet & Clank movie is vibrant fun for longtime series devotees and should captivate young kids who are new to the franchise. All others need not apply.

The story brings us in on Ratchet (voiced by James Arnold Taylor), a mechanic with dreams of joining the Galactic Rangers and becoming a hero alongside his idol Captain Qwark (voiced by Jim Ward). When Dr. Nefarious (voiced by Armin Shimerman) and Chairman Drek (voiced by Paul Giamatti) re-emerge with a bigger scheme, the Galactic Rangers must recruit an additional member to help fight back. We can all guess who gets the gig. On his way to intergalactic superstardom, Ratchet meets Clank (voiced by David Kaye), an android created as a defect during the manufacturing of Dr. Nefarious's killer robot army. Through a series of slapstick moments, Ratchet, Clank and the Rangers take on overwhelming odds and learn the importance of friendship and teamwork.

The best thing about Ratchet & Clank is that the story allows for plenty of charming character moments without losing its overall focus. Eagle-eyed PlayStation fans will get a kick out of the scene where Clank scans Ratchet in order to figure out what species he is. One of the potential matches is another beloved PS2 character. Between this scene and the introduction of various characters and favorite weapons from the Rangers' arsenal, there's a satisfying bit of fan service at work. 

Some may go as far as calling Ratchet & Clank the best movie adaptation of a video game ever made, and perhaps it is. The bar isn't terribly high right now; the potential savior may still be coming down the pike in the form of Justin Kurzel's Assassin's Creed. That said, almost every big animated film released in the past couple of years has turned out to be thematically rich, emotionally dense, artistically stunning, and just plain entertaining to boot. Looking at you Lego Movie, Inside Out, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, How to Train Your Dragon 2... 

Since we've been spoiled so much lately, it's hard to turn the brain completely off for Ratchet & Clank's brand of Saturday-morning buffoonery. It's fun, and a bit nostalgic, but there are plenty of other, better, films out there offering the same thing. Ratchet & Clank ultimately gives us nothing that we haven't seen before in Toy Story, Star Wars, or in episodes of "Jimmy Neutron." Level-headed adults and teens too young to recall the games are better off finding their entertainment elsewhere, but twentysomething fans and young children should enjoy it.

C

"Hardcore Henry" Review

You may remember a number of years back a pair of music videos that appeared on YouTube for a band called Biting Elbows. These two videos - "The Stampede" and "Bad Motherfucker" - were filmed from a first-person perspective and involved the main character leaping, chasing, punching and shooting his way through suited bad guys. "The Stampede" happened in an office building, and then "Bad Motherfucker" took the action all across a grungy cityscape.

After demonstrating their skills on YouTube, Russian-American filmmaker Ilya Naishuller and producer Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) thought it'd be a fun idea to make a feature-length action picture filmed entirely from the first-person point of view. So Naishuller strapped some GoPro Hero 3 cameras to a rig worn around one's head like a mask and set to work on Hardcore Henry.

In Hardcore Henry, the titular hero awakens with no memory as he is reassembled from bionic parts by his wife Estelle (Haley Bennett). After a warlord (Danila Kozlovsky) attacks Estelle's lab, Henry sets out to rediscover his identity and to rescue his wife before an army of bionic soldiers is unleashed on the world. Helping Henry along the way is Jimmy (Sharlto Copley, in a delightfully bonkers turn), a cripple who uses various bionic copies of himself to prepare for any situation. There's ghillie suit Jimmy, punk-rock Jimmy, RAF Jimmy, cokehead playboy Jimmy, hobo Jimmy, and secret agent Jimmy just to name a few.

The warlord Akan (Kozlovsky) throws all the bad guys he can at Henry and Jimmy (quite literally in a rooftop fight sequence set to Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now"), and in the process makes for non-stop bloody mayhem as you've never seen it before this side of Call of Duty.

Endlessly exciting and deliriously unpretentious, I could never look away from Hardcore Henry. The gimmicky visuals worked. Somehow, the migraine never set in. Those especially accustomed to first-person shooter video games should be fine.

At one point during production, someone advised Naishuller that they should include a health bar and ammo HUD (heads-up display) on-screen at all times as a joke to gamers. Wisely, Naishuller declined to let the gimmick go quite that far. Hardcore Henry remains a fun, mindless little movie, and if it had included a HUD, I probably would've brought an Xbox controller to the theater. As much as companies like Microsoft want to close the gap between film, television and video games, I prefer at least a shred of differentiation.

The biggest negatives to take away here are that the story is rather weak, and character development is slim-to-none. Akan is a nasty villain, but the first-person gimmick doesn't allow us to explore his character at all. The most well-developed character is Jimmy, and it's not even his movie. The narrative doesn't answer enough of its own questions and seems content to serve as a thin excuse to string together action sequences. The ending is abrupt, yet just cynical and funny enough to be satisfying. That said, I don't think anyone will be clamoring for Hardcore Henry 2.

Those looking for an action movie that breaks the mold should find some satisfaction in Hardcore Henry. Though the plot may be thin, the first-person gimmick, breathless action sequences, and "Looney Tunes"-sense of humor make for a fun time.

B-

Thoughts on the First Official Trailer for "Hardcore Henry"

Hardcore Henry | Official Trailer | STX Entertainment

By: Levi Hill

The first trailer for Hardcore Henry was recently released, and it is definitely worth taking a look at - unless you’re easily susceptible to motion sickness. The trailer sells the film as “a motion picture event unlike any other,” and it’s pretty obvious that the movie is taking some pretty enormous risks that could either pay off big time or fail spectacularly.

Hardcore Henry is a first-person action movie, meaning you see everything through the protagonist’s eyes. It is obvious that the film takes a great deal of inspiration from countless "first-person shooter" video games. The protagonist, Henry, is half-man, half-machine. Following the tradition of most first-person shooters, Henry is also mute. As the trailer conveniently states, his “speech module” hasn’t been installed yet.

Hardcore Henry looks interesting purely because of the enormous risk it's taking by being a live-action, entirely first-person narrative. Featuring the talents of Tim Roth, Sharlto Copley and Haley Bennett, the movie doesn’t lack talent in front of the camera’s ”eyes.” However, the film’s plot seems incredibly bland. A menacing group wants the technology that has been installed into Henry; so in order to get to him, they kidnap his wife.

Given the innovative way the film is presented, the plot could be more interesting. If the action holds up, however, a bland plot may not be a glaring issue to most viewers. Thankfully the action in the trailer looks easy to follow, which is surprising considering that the camera will probably be incredibly shaky during most of the action scenes.

Whether or not Hardcore Henry will make viewers sick, à la Cloverfield, or will live up to the creative premise is yet to be seen, but this trailer at least caught my attention.