Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton, Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina
Genre: Adventure
Direction: Mike Newell
Duration: 1 hour 56 minutes
Rating : 2.5/5


In Prince of Persia, the sands of time become a powerful ally, a threatening adversary and a clunky Magoffin. But, after sitting through Mike Newell’s would-be throw-back to the matinee adventures of yesteryear, it’s likely to be the audience who wishes they could push the button on that magic knife of Dastan’s and rewind a few hours.

Filled with empty spectacle, over-edited, erratic camera work, and a cast of American and British actors half-heartedly walking through the roles of Persian characters, Prince is a dud from the word go. For months I’ve scoffed at the likeliness of baby-faced Jake Gyllenhaal playing a swashbuckling Persian warrior, but the tradition of Hollywood to cast ill-fitting Caucasians in roles that should belong to others is a long one. As it turns out, Gylenhaal as Prince Dastan, the once street urchin turned foster son of the king, isn’t the deal breaker for the movie. He’s clumsy for sure, working from a script that never considers him as much more than a cgi bauble leaping from rooftops and scrabbling up tall towers, but every other aspect of the film is similarly half-baked and poorly planned.
After awhile, the sheer laziness of the filmmakers creates its own cinematic sand trap into which any potential entertainment value sinks. Both Gylenhaal and Gemma Arterton, as the princess of another kingdomwho flees with Dastan when he’s framed for the death of his father, put their best foot forward in generating some kind of feeling and chemistry between their characters. I would have liked to have seen them in a different film where they weren’t wearing the absurdities of this one around their neck like an albatross.
Arterton in particular is both fetching and endearing as a screen presence, and she gets to do more here than she did in either Quantum of Solace or last month’s Clash of the Titans. In the end what they can’t manage to generate is energy and verve, and there’s no one in the primary casting who can either. Ben Kingsley’s nefarious advisor in particular, is so one note and obviously evil that it hardly requires an actor of Kingsley’s caliber and range when a paper cut-out of Snidely Whiplash would have served just as well.
Eventually though, Prince does find one momentary oasis of interest in the form of the always engaging Alfred Molina, playing a desert brigand who’s created a financially lucrative enterprise around racing ostriches like horses. Molina is under plenty of goofy makeup and unconvincing costuming, but that half-mad twinkle in his eyes in unmistakable and he milks what humor and quirkiness he can from such a meager premise. Strangely, we never get many scenes of the ostriches and I fully expected to see our heroes fleeing the villains via ostrich, but this only never happens it’s never even hinted at.
Molina, on the other hand, is brought back again and again into the story, and although he never manages to tip the balance or really transform the scenes he’s in, his presence becomes like that of a good friend who’s stuck with you in a bad situation. Yea, things are pretty bleak and hopeless, but at least he’s right there with you. Quite literally, he’s the only thing the movie has going for it.
When the magical dagger is introduced into the story–it’s a knife with a big red button in its hilt that basically gives you a brief do-over of events– it moves Prince ever closer to being a fully fledged videogame. The weapon itself actually sort of resembles a quirky videogame controller, and its function in the plot is like the reset button meets Zelda’s Tri-star.
The action scenes and set pieces in Prince of Persia are curious. They have obviously required plenty of time and money to create, but little of the impact or splendor they should provide end up on the screen. Every battle scene has been hacked apart and reassembled to the point where it barely resembles actual human interaction and the special effects are almost purposefully calibrated to resemble the videogame upon which the film is based. Gylenhaal’s Dastan becomes a gummy little rubber man as he races across crumbling bridges or attempts to outrun angry geysers of bellowing sand. The film wants to have an old-school charm that belonged to films like Thief of Bagdad, but it can’t even muster the goofy charm of Stephen Sommer’s original Mummy movie.
The problem here is that Newell doesn’t seem to feel comfortable in the picture’s action shoes. He handled himself well enough with his entry in the Harry Potter series back in 2005, but here he has foolishly attached himself to a script that lacks the kind of human interaction he usually excels as illustrating. As a result, he refers often to the shorthand narrative devices of actual videogames, giving extreme zoom, swirling camera shots that establish character placement, and set pieces that look as if they were originally ‘cut scenes’ from the game.
Nothing feels natural, and because there’s none of that, there’s no counterpoint so any of the rest feels wondrous. To this day, we can watch the crude special effects and matte paintings of Sabu’s Thief of Bagdad and feel a certain sense of elation and enchantment. You can see the evidence of careful human hands creating the effect, and the scenes are given space and breath so that we may regard them at our leisure, marveling at a man climbing a genie’s massive arm or flying through the sky on a mechanical horse.
In Persia, everything looks like a disgruntled programmer pushed a button on the computer, went home for the weekend, and came back to find a fully rendered film completely devoid of any real feeling or inspiration.


Verdict : Give it a try