Producers: V.J. Guibal, Nicolas Brigaud-Robert, Joshua Astrachan and David Kaplan   Director: Matt Sobel   Screenplay: Kyle Warren   Cast: Naomi Watts, Cameron Crovetti, Nicholas Crovetti, Peter Hermann, Crystal Lucas-Perry and Jeremy Bobb   Distributor: Prime Video

Grade: D-

Very few people who watch Matt Sobel’s limp, tepid thriller will have seen the 2014 Austrian film by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala from which it’s been adapted, and will probably scoff when told how genuinely frightening and disturbing the original was.  Like so many attempts to redo foreign chillers, this drab, listless “Goodnight Mommy” is a feeble copy of a far superior movie, bled almost dry of its predecessor’s sinister, gruesome edge.

Only the basic premise remains.  Two young brothers, Elias (Cameron Crovetti) and Lukas (Nicholas Crovetti)—twins in the original, but not here (and one wonders why their oddly foreign-sounding first names weren’t changed, given that everything else is Americanized)—are reunited with their mother (Naomi Watts) at her isolated home.  (There’s an old barn on the property, which is odd since the modernist place is surely no farm, but then it’s needed for the clumsily refashioned finale.)

In the original, this reunion isn’t explained; it just happens.  Here, in just the first effort to “normalize” a distinctly abnormal story, they’re dropped off by their father (Peter Hermann), who’s apparently on bad terms with his ex-wife.  She’s not there to greet the boys, who go into the house to find her in a full-head bandage-mask, which she explains as the result of a “little procedure,” obviously a face-lift designed to extend what’s apparently an acting career.  She also lays down some rules about keeping things quiet while she recuperates.

It doesn’t take long before Lukas begins to question whether the woman is really their mother at all.  She no longer sings “You Are My Sunshine” to them at bedtime, she rips up a drawing Elias has made for her, and she seems not loving but overbearing and imperious, especially when she finds them making their way into that forbidden barn.  Her eyes, moreover, as Lukas notes, are blue, while those in her old headshots are green.  Elias is persuaded, and they decide first to run away—they’re caught and returned by two local cops, concerned Sandy (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and oafishly dismissive Gary (Jeremy Bobb)—and then decide to put physical pressure on their purported mother to confess her imposture.           

In the original film, their torture of the woman was horrifyingly grisly, interrupted only by an intrusion by a couple of charity solicitors.  Here it’s stripped down and sanitized into simply tying her to a bed and gagging her when those two Keystone Kops return to check that everything’s okay.  Eventually there’s a big revelation that explains why the boys and their mother have been acting so strangely; in the first picture, it was presented in oblique and unnerving terms, but here it’s spelled out explicitly with a return visit to that out-of-place barn, in the apparent belief that American audiences are too dense to be able to deal with any hint of ambiguity.  Sobel and screenwriter Kyle Warren retain the original’s coda, but typically lose the ethereal quality it possessed.

Watts brings her customary professionalism to the role of the mother, and her star status probably required that the mask be removed in the last act so that her full-throated emoting wouldn’t be impeded by it.  The Crovetti boys get by, but only barely; cinematographer Alexander Dynan, whose work doesn’t achieve the moody visual aesthetic of the Austrian film, resorts to using a lot of facial shadows to make them look vaguely haunted—and the insertion of a couple of nightmare sequences is a cheap way to accentuate Elias’ psychological turmoil.  Lucas-Perry and Bobb do what they can with their poorly-written, stereotyped parts.

Apart from Dynan’s prosaic camerawork, the technical credits include a production design by Mary Lena Colston that never gives the house a particularly spooky feel and costumes by Carisa Kelly that, apart from the silken robe that shows off Watts’s sleek figure, add little to the texture.  Editors Michael Taylor and Maya Maffioli attempt to wring some tension from a narrative that’s been reduced to nearly nothing, while Alex Weston’s music opts for a grumbling, ominous mood until the closing crawls, when it finally shrieks out with screaming strings, perhaps to awaken viewers by then lulled into slumber or simple torpor.

Don’t let this damp squib of a thriller keep you from investigating the 2014 version.  The original “Goodbye Mommy” was a film it was hard to shake off; this misguided remake is one that, thankfully, will be difficult to remember.

Grade: D-

If there’s anything worse than dumb schlock, it’s pretentious schlock. “Assassin’s Creed,” based on an apparently popular series of video games, purports to say something about the importance of free will against enforced conformity—as “A Clockwork Orange” so memorably did. But like so many pop culture pieces of similar type—“V for Vendetta” is a perfect example—it dresses up the message in an orgy of empty action, violence and distinctly unspecial visual effects. The symbol of freedom it repeatedly references is a soaring eagle, but the movie itself is a dead duck.

The picture immediately raises the question: what possessed a fine actor like Michael Fassbender to agree not only to star in it but to serve as one of its producers? Perhaps his reason had to do with his bank account and dreams of a lucrative franchise, but more likely it was simply a matter of friendship. Director Justin Kurzel had cast him—along with Marion Cotillard, who also co-stars with Fassbender here—in last year’s well-received “Macbeth,” and both might have felt a debt to him. If so, the result proves once again that in making career choices, friendship should have its limits.

In any event, Fassbender plays Callum Lynch, a death-row inmate who is “reborn” immediately after his execution in the laboratory of the Abstergo Corporation headed by Alan Rikkin (Jeremy Irons) and his daughter Sophia (Cotillard). Callum, it is soon revealed, is a descendant of a fifteenth-century Spaniard named Aguilar de Nerha, who was a member of a group called the Assassins, which had for centuries been the sworn opponents of the Knights Templar, representing freedom of will over the Templars’ ideal of bringing peace to the world through total order. The Templar program at the time is embodied in the Spanish Inquisition and its leader Torquemada (Javier Gutierrez), and what they are seeking is an orb called the Apple of Eden, representing man’s fall from grace, which contains the DNA of disobedience that can be used to control, or more properly eliminate, man’s impetus to violence.

In 1492, it’s revealed, the Apple is in the possession of the Sultan of Granada, the last Moslem enclave in the Iberian peninsula, and Torquemada’s men have captured his son to use as a pawn to force his father to turn the artifact over to them. Aguilar springs into action along with his confederate Maria (Ariane Labed) to prevent the exchange.

So what has contemporary Callum to do with all this? Well, it seems that by connecting him to a massive device called the Animus, Sophia can merge him with Aguilar, and get him to re-enact his ancestor’s actions, down to the revelation of where the long-dead Assassin hid the Apple five centuries ago. The question is whether Callum will fall in with this scheme or overcome his hatred of his father (Brendan Gleeeson), an Assassin who killed his wife, and join the other Assassins imprisoned at Abstergo to save human freedom yet again.

The goofiness of all this should be apparent, even before the last-minute addition of a plot element involving the tomb of Christopher Columbus that takes the script, credited—if that’s the appropriate word—to no fewer than three writers, deep into Dan Brown territory. But from the filmmakers’ perspective all that’s important is that the oddball narrative allows for the insertion of prolonged action sequences—chases, martial-arts fights, swordplay, and leaps from astronomical heights—that are supposed to be exciting but fall flat, partially because they’re all shot in the drab tones characteristic of Adam Arkapaw’s cinematography but also because they’re constantly intercut by editor Christopher Tellesfsen with modern-day inserts of Callum replaying Aguilar’s moves while in the Animus’ metal tentacles. Even a big scene set at a fiery auto-de-fe that doesn’t go quite as Torquemada expected generates no sparks of excitement.

The cast aren’t aided by the humorlessness of the screenplay, which treats the hokum with a degree of seriousness that makes it all the more ludicrous. Fassbender is a dour, dull hero in both temporal spheres, while Cotillard and Irons are boringly impassive throughout. Nobody else fares well either, especially Charlotte Rampling, another distinguished actor, who pops up briefly as the Templars’ head modern honcho. Throughout Kurzel treats the ridiculous material with a dogged earnestness he didn’t feel compelled to lavish on his Shakespeare, and whatever grandeur might have existed in Andy Nicholson’s production design or Sammy Sheldon Differ’s costumes is pretty much lost in the images, which are murky even in 2D format (one can only imagine they’ll be even darker and more impenetrable in 3D). Jed Kurzel’s score is blowsy and bombastic.

What encourages studios to think that period adventure movies are the perfect Christmas releases, anyway? Universal bombed a few years back with “47 Ronin,” and now Fox is poised to do likewise with this silly misfire. Maybe the suits believe that “Assassin’s Creed” might benefit from overflow audiences from sold-out showings of “Rogue One.” You can almost hear them muttering: Help it, Obi-wan, you’re its only hope.