PASSENGERS: 2 STARS

Like “Every Breath You Take,” the wedding band standard Police tune from 1983, the new film “Passengers,” depending on your point of view, is either an ode to romantic love or the story of an obsessed stalker.

The action takes place aboard the Avalon, a massive spaceship on a 120-year mission to deliver 5,259 people to Homestead II. All passengers are asleep, suspended in time until they arrive on the planet colony. “Don't get homesick! Get Homestead!”

Among the travellers is Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), an engineer anxious to start a new life in a new world. His deep slumber is interrupted when an asteroid slams the Avalon, waking him up ninety years too early.

Alone, save for android bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen), Jim is at loose ends. After a year drifting around the empty ship on an extended, lonely boys night out—he boozes-it-up, eats whatever he wants, plays video games and doesn’t shave—Jim becomes convinced he will die in a spacy solitary confinement long before the ship arrives at its destination. To alleviate his loneliness he goes about choosing a mate to pass the time. After some research he settles on Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence), a pretty journalist from New York City. “Say you figured out how to make your life a million times better,” he asks, “but it was wrong. What would you do?”

That is the big question at the heart of “Passengers.” Is Jim a hopeless romantic looking for love or a stalker who plucked Aurora out of her safe bubble to essentially hand her a death sentence? Answer that question to gauge your “Passengers” enjoyment level.

“Passengers” could easily have played as a horror film. Imagine a different cast, the loneliness of space and a little less romance and you would have a perfectly creepy vehicle for Ben Foster. Instead we have a strappingly handsome presence in Pratt who is does, to be fair, seem conflicted about what to do and later sorry for what he did. He’s a charismatic and likable star and that is supposed to make it OK that he makes life-and-death decisions for her without first asking for consent.

Add to that some epic scale special effects—a gravity-free swimming pool and a misfiring nuclear reactor—and you have one of the strangest movies of the year. It should work. Individually Pratt and Lawrence are spark plugs; unfortunately no sparks fly between them on screen. Each are reliable, amiable additions to almost any other movie, but here they fall flat, failing to draw the audience into their strange new world.

The film is at its best when Pratt is prattling around the ship on his own, having trite conversations with Arthur. Sheen is wonderfully perfunctory as the android who (almost) always has the right thing to say and the sense of boredom and growing ennui that arises is effectively portrayed. It’s the misguided “romance” that comes afterwards that doesn’t seem to fit. Lawrence, the very model of grrrl power in the “Hunger Games” movies, allows herself to be relegated to the fantasy girl role here, inexplicitly easing Jim’s guilt when the movie runs out of ways to have the pair interact.

“Passengers” desperately wants to be a feel-good romance but never quite gets there. A few tweaks could have turned it into a creepy look at Jim’s desperation or an amusing film about technology gone wrong—imagine if Hal from 2001 was an automated customer service attendant—but instead it’s done in by the story’s sexist undercurrent.

SING: 3 STARS

“Sing,” like the name would suggest, is a jukebox musical. The hits of Taylor Swift, Elton John and even the late, great Leonard Cohen are all present and sung by a lounge-singing mouse and an elephant, among others. Think of it as the “Jersey Boys” of the animal kingdom and you’ll get the idea.

“Sing” is Matthew McConaughey’s second animated movie of the year after “Kubo and the Two Strings,” but the first film featuring his unique vocal stylings. As Buster Moon, a koala who throws a singing competition to save his failing theatre, the Oscar-winner does an a cappella version of Carly Rae Jepsen’s earworm “Call Me Maybe.”

Before the warbling, however, comes the story of Moon’s show business aspirations. As a child he saw Miss Nana Noodleman (Jennifer Saunders) live on stage and immediately fell in love with the theatre. So much so that he, with the help of this father, saved up and purchased the theatre with dreams of becoming an impresario. Trouble is, he isn’t much of a showman. Filled with passion but short on talent, he staged flop after flop and by the time we meet him he’s dodging calls from his bank as he tries to figure out a way to pay the mortgage. “None of your shows have worked Mr. Moon!” says Judith from the bank. “Better settle your account by the end of the month!”

His great idea? Throw a singing competition with some of the city’s best undiscovered talent and pack his place to the rafters with people willing to hear them sing. It worked for “American Idol,” so what could go wrong? How about an arrogant lounge singing mouse (Seth MacFarlane) with ties to some nasty underworld bears? Or a stage struck elephant (Tori Kelly)? Perhaps an ill-conceived stage design involving hundreds of shrimps and thousands of gallons of water?

Featuring 85 hit songs from the 1940s to the present day, “Sing” also contains a brand new track by Stevie Wonder and Ariana Grande called “Faith” and good messages for kids about not letting fear get in the way of the things you love, never giving up, about following your dreams. It’s a frenetic package that zips along very quickly you hardly notice it’s a ninety-minute movie stretched to a two-hour running time. The songs—many of them earworms that will linger for hours after the end credits roll—pad out the action, prolonging the inevitable happy ending.

Two hours for an animated movie that offers something more than catchy tunes and platitudes is fine. Unfortunately “Sing,” while beautifully animated is too concerned with being a crowd-pleaser to be about much of anything. It rises to the level above “cute” on the Animation-O-Meter. Some Pixar-level subtext is missing. It’s pretty good eye candy and some giggles but not so much funny stuff as you might imagine in a movie that features a pig in gold lamé.

ASSASSIN’S CREED: 2 ½ STARS

“Assassin’s Creed” may have the highest-end cast ever for a movie based on a videogame. Ripe with Oscar nominees and winners like Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson and Charlotte Rampling, it’s the poshest piffle to ever leap from the gaming consul to the big screen.

Based on the wildly popular Ubisoft videogames of the same name, the movie is a standalone that does not follow the storyline of the games.

When we first see Fassbender, it’s the time of the Spanish Inquisition. He is Aguilar de Nerha, head of a stealthy brotherhood of assassins charged with making sure that rivals Knights Templar don’t get their hands on a holy relic called The Apple of Eden. “We work in the dark to service the light!” The stakes are high as the mystical device contains “the seed of man’s first disobedience.”

Jump forward to 2016. Fassbender is now Cal Lynch, a career criminal set on a bad path as a child when he saw his father murder his mother. On death row for the murder of a pimp he is to be executed. Instead he is whisked away by multinational corporate conglomerate Abstergo. “What do you want from me?” Callum asks. “Your past,” says the lead scientist of the Animus project at Abstergo Foundation, Sophia Rikkin (Cotillard).

Using something called the Animus, Abstergo unlocks Cal’s genetic memory, essentially seeing through Aguilar de Nerha’s 15th century eyes as they look for clues to the location of the Apple.

It’s Ancestry.ca gone wild! It’s also an almost incomprehensible story about ancient rivalries and, more confusingly, “the genetic code for free will.” What, exactly does that mean? Who knows? The plot, such that it is, is essentially a load of gobbledygook that fills the gaps between the action scenes. Plot points are delivered with Fassbender’s trademarked intense glare and solemn intonations from Irons and the rest of the cast, so they must mean something, right? If you figure it out, let me know.

The action sequences are plentiful and set at a time when, apparently the world was shrouded in a brown mist. Through the murk you see some nifty 15th century style Parkour, plenty of swordplay, and, of course, the Fassbender Glare©. Director Justin Kurzel and cast take things a little too seriously—extolling ideas about the eradication of violence etc—but when they’re not talking “Assassin’s Creed” is quite silly and a bit of fun.