LYT Review: PRINCE OF PERSIA - THE SANDS OF TIME

I don’t expect too many things from video-game movies. But I do expect them, at least once, however briefly, to capture the thrill of the source material. Thus, whatever your opinion of the movie versions of MORTAL KOMBAT and DOA: DEAD OR ALIVE, let us give them this much credit: they have some good fight scenes. RESIDENT EVIL, the first one anyway, managed in its opening moments to replicate the game’s tension of discovery, by giving us a protagonist with amnesia and setting her loose in a strange mansion before busting out the zombies and such. SILENT HILL had creepy moments in the dark.

I haven’t played PRINCE OF PERSIA in any form – I used to boast that I was the only critic who would play the games, back when I had a full salary and expense account – but I understand that it’s a platform game. And yet the movie cannot give us one decent, extended sequence of roof-jumping. Yes, Jake Gyllenhaal jumps across ledges...but whenever this happens, it is goosed either with slo-mo, stuttery speed-up, or annoying editing tricks. For all the talk of parkour, we never once feel the true tension of someone on a high wall taking death-defying chances. Even Disney’s animated Aladdin seemed to be in more danger.

Not helping on the suspense front is the Dagger of Time, a mystical object that essentially allows our hero a do-over any time he screws up, or simply isn’t fast enough to anticipate things. I know it’s being true to the game on that score, but c’mon, you didn’t see the characters in the DOOM movie literally using cheat codes.

 

Gyllenhaal plays Dastan, and we know he’s called Dastan, because characters specifically refer to him by name onscreen every two minutes or so. (Perhaps “Dastan” is ancient Persian for “Denny.”) Just like Disney’s Aladdin, he’s a street urchin who becomes a prince, though the process for Dastan is a whole lot quicker...the King likes seeing a little kid stand up to one of his guards, and instantly adopts him, in the manner that monarchs tend to do. This despite the fact that the king already has two sons, Tus (Richard Coyle) and Garsiv (Toby Kebbell). All of them have English accents for consistency.

Things kick off with the king’s sons going to war on a city called Alamut, because their intel has said that the people there are making weapons. But lo and behold, after the invasion, no weapons are found...it was a ruse by the king’s evil bald second-in-command, his brother Nizam (Ben Kingsley, looking much like he did in Uwe Boll’s BLOODRAYNE, which is a superior movie. Yes it is.). If it sounds tediously familiar, you’re not alone...especially when, later in the movie, a character boasts about not paying his taxes both because they’re unfair to the small businessman, and fund “secret government killing activity.”

Look, I don’t like Dick Cheney or the Iraq war, but I don’t need my friggin’ Arabian Nights action movies to remind me of that fact. Just like Robin Hood giving libertarian lectures in the Ridley Scott version, this is unneeded and irritating...probably doubly so if your politics are different from mine. Not every big dumb period action flick needs to be cursorily “of the moment.” And if you’re gonna do that, be a bit more subtle...like AVATAR. Yes, I said “subtle” in the same sentence as “AVATAR”...that’s what you call the cinematic theory of relativity.

Or, to put it another way...imagine if, in CLASH OF THE TITANS, Zeus had referred to Medusa’s head as a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Would it have been a better movie because of it?

Perhaps it wouldn’t matter if the rest of the movie were better. Anyway, Dastan is betrayed and framed for murder, and goes on the run alongside Alamut-ian princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton, all of 24 years old and already looking like a plastic surgery disaster. Yeah, she may generate a boner, but it’s a false-feeling one, sorta like the hard-on you get from watching Jessica Rabbit). They hate each other at first, but, well, whatever, you know the drill. They have to do something or other with the Dagger of Time before Nizam does something else with it that would be bad, because he doesn’t know of the truly bad consequences. And then there’s a part where Alfred Molina shows up to host an ostrich race, like out of the game JOUST, except they don’t fly. Molina desperately tries to add comic relief, which is a worthy goal, and one Jerry Bruckheimer doesn’t seem willing to let him get away with.

Then there’s a villain in black who has a CGI snake literally up his sleeve. He’s so boring they didn’t bother to cast a good actor in the role, or even give the character a name beyond “Hassansin Leader.” Oh, wait, I just double checked my press kit...seems he’s just listed as that in the credits, but in the cast and crew section, where they have pictures of the leads, he’s also given the name “Zolm.” For all the times they say “Dastan” aloud, you’d think they could say “Zolm” once or twice.

I’m not going to use the hoary old “I liked this movie better when it was called...” line, because that’s lame. But I will note that a movie of this sort I found to be much more enjoyable, on a lower budget, was THE SCORPION KING. The Rock and Michael Clarke Duncan hit each other hard, Kelly Hu was way hotter than Arterton, the humor didn’t detract from the action, and some of the fights were fun to watch. PRINCE OF PERSIA generates some unintentional laughs, particularly in scenes where Gyllenhaal and Arterton are required to make goo-goo eyes at each other, but other than that, it’s mostly tedium. And there isn’t even much point to Jake having newly huge muscles.

Going in, it occurred to me that this was the first year in a long time that I was NOT excited about the big Memorial Day action movie. Coming out, I know I was correct not to be.

 

Luke Y. Thompson is an actor, writer, and film critic living in Hollywood.