Assassin's Creed review – Michael Fassbender game movie achieves transcendental boredom

This film adaptation of the successful videogame, in which Fassbender must battle Templars after the original apple from Eden, is an interminable, lifeless mess

"What the fuck is going on?" mutters Michael Fassbender's character through clenched teeth, reasonably early on in the course of this interminable film, based on the lucrative video game series Assassin's Creed. You can imagine each of its stars - Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Essie Davis - saying much the same thing while looking through the script, before being directed to the fee on the last page of their contract. It's an action movie, with dollops of thriller and splodges of Dan Brown conspiracy; and hardly five minutes go by without someone in a monk's outfit doing a bit of sub-parkour jumping from the roof of one building to another. And yet it is at all times mysteriously, transcendentally boring.

I bet playing the game is much more exciting. But then getting Fassbender to slap a coat of Dulux on the wall of his hi-tech prison cell and monitoring the progressive moisture-loss would be more exciting.