I recently wrote about how wonderfully awful Assassin 33 AD was and come to find out there are a ton of people out there that love this film for the same reasons that I do. It is just awful from start to finish but with a budget of $5 million, they really had a try at trying to take the film seriously. Unintentionally, they ended up making one of the funniest, most cliché movies I have ever seen. It gets a lot of hate on review sites but that is mostly from people that are trying to grade it on what the producers intended it to be. They intended the movie to be taken seriously as a Christian recruitment movie and if that is how you are looking at it, yes, it is terrible.
However, if you watch it for just how terrible everything is about it, it is really funny and good.
They actually REMADE Assassin 33 AD because some people out there said they were confused by all the time-travel, which is understandable because it doesn't make any sense kind of like how Marty McFly goes back to the future to save Doc Brown but only gives himself 10 minutes despite the fact that he could have as much time as he wanted.
This film is essentially the same thing as Assassin 33 AD but they cut out some stuff that seemed a bit harsh towards Islam and also did narration on the part of the character "Ram" to try to clear up some of the ambiguity as far as the time travel stuff was concerned. I would say that they didn't manage to accomplish either one of these goals and was disappointed that they tried to take out the parts where they were calling out Islamic fundamentalists for wanting to eliminate Christianity, which I think we can all agree the radical members of this group would definitely do if they had the chance.
One thing that they didn't change because doing so would incorporate reshooting the entire film was the stereotypical way that the character Simon behaves and talks in the film. This guy is African-American and is meant to be one of the top scientific minds in the world but he still speaks with really forced street slang rather than talking how one would expect a scientist would.
Here's one of his actual lines from the movie
"What we stoppin' fo? Yo, we got's ta move!"
I don't know what motivated them to have Simon talk like this or if the actor just decided to do it himself but either way it is just hilarious. Even when Simon finds himself face-to-face with Jesus he talks as though he stumbled out of the set of New Jack City and without changing characters, read the lines for this movie in the same day. Is it offensive? I guess that depends on how sensitive you are but for me and other people with a sense of humor, it is hilarious and awful. That being said Lamar Usher, the actor who plays Simon, is probably the best actor in this entire film. Don't get ahead of yourself, this isn't saying a lot at all.
Other things that they left in the film was the parts where a group of commandos goes back in time and attacks roman soldiers with guns and this violates every theory that we have about time-travel and how you cannot introduce new technology into the timeline or you change all of it. They also have this very strange dialogue with Jesus where he is familiar not just with what movies are, but even lines from certain movies such as Terminator and Passion of the Christ. He has this knowledge because I guess because the people making the movie wanted to showcase his omnipotence, but at the same time and in the same exchange he has no idea that he is about to be crucified. It's all just really poor writing but that in itself is what makes this a gem of a film that anyone who appreciates bad cinema is going to absolutely love.
I highly recommend that you see either Assassin 33AD or Black Easter but if you aren't going to take the time here is a series of clips that someone pieced together that showcases the unintentional humor that is all through this film.
I stand by my original statement that you really should watch this movie and you can do so right on YouTube if you want. The makers of the film apparently do not care how people see this movie, they just want them to be able to, which I admire. You can do so, for free here