Aggrogate

Prince of Persia: So close, yet so far

[This review has a few spoilers. They're not particularly interesting spoilers that reveal anything you won't pick up on five minutes into the movie, but heads up anyway.]

Once again, Hollywood has taken a video game full of opportunity for action-packed fight scenes, special effects and other summer blockbuster fodder, and spent $200 million turning it into a thoroughly mediocre action film that completely misses the game's point.

On paper, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time showed potential. Director Mike Newell and producer Jerry Bruckheimer gathered together big-name actors, a huge special effects budget, and at least a passing understanding that the movie needed parkour and time travel elements, and then showed that they had absolutely no idea what to do with any of it.

The game was about a prince who releases a catastrophic force with a magic dagger, and then fights and jumps through deadly, trap-filled corridors trying to fix the damage he caused. It had magical monsters, perilous traps, and loads of clever, choreographed action. The movie is about a prince who finds a dagger and wanders around the desert while dealing with a boring coup.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but this movie needed more bullet-time. While the original video game treated the Sands of Time as a core gameplay mechanic, the movie reduces them to an occasional special effects-justifying MacGuffin. They're not used to stop time and change the outcome of a battle, or to slow down time to avert disaster or solve an ancient riddle. The Sands of Time in the movie are strictly used to go back in time, with very little impact on the action. This is one of the few cases where slowed down Matrix-like action sequences would have been justified instead of gratuitous, but they just didn't happen. The very premise of the film gave Newell a chance to legitimately use the most abused action film-making technique of the last decade, and he just shrugged and said, "Nah, we don't need it."

The lack of time-warping special effects would have been more palatable if the film gave enough attention to the other important aspect of the game: stunt-filled, obstacle-dodging, acrobatic free-running. Sadly, even that was all but ignored. There are no smooth, breathtaking parkour lines in which Dastun jumps and climbs through perils and traps. Instead, the free-running shown in the film is strangely subdued and much more realistic than it has any right to be, with awkwardly filmed leaps and boring, clunky climbing sequences. Again, the film's premise presented plenty of opportunities to show fantastic, death-defying stunts, and Newell ignored them.

There are a few subtle flickers of the Prince of Persia games' genius in the movie: a clever stunt here, a plot callback there, a familiar special effects sequence way over there. These tiny bits of familiarity are scattered randomly around the film. The trailer and commercials for the film showed a wicked, bladed whip like the Dark Prince's in Warrior Within, a weapon revealed to be wielded by a nameless assassin who dies seconds after he's introduced. The time traveling special effect evokes images of the Dark Prince for no real reason, giving the user strange, glowing scars as they shift through the sands. They're strange elements from the games that add up to very little cohesive appeal.

Jake Gyllenhaal makes a terrible Prince of Persia, but not because of his race. His Prince Dastan fails because he is so painfully bland. While the script describes a roguish, street-wise pauper-turned-prince, Gyllenhaal portrays a vaguely smug, one-dimensional action hero who makes every one of Nic Cage's characters seem unique and memorable. He could have been played entirely by a stunt double and it wouldn't have affected the character.

The supporting cast fares little better. Gemma Arterton plays love interest Princess Tamina, whose character fluctuates between shrill, insane, and inexplicably saccharine. Ben Kingsley plays the obviously sinister Nazam, who wears more guyliner than Nestor Carbonell, and whose obvious villainy is only hidden by the fact that the fake-out villain is played by Richard Coyle, who looks and acts like a young Sean Bean. Indeed, the real surprise in the movie is that Sean Bean Lite isn't the one who betrays and tries to kill everyone.

I'm worried for Sir Ben Kingsley. Considering the fates of Raul Julia after Street Fighter, Marlon Brando after The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Orson Welles after Transformers: The Movie, it's a safe bet that the universe is now actively trying to kill him. On the other hand, he was in Bloodrayne and survived, so maybe he's safe. Either way, he's come a long way since Gandhi, and that way has been almost entirely straight down.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time isn't a terrible movie. It's a middling, slow action flick, but it offers at least some entertainment in its strangely subdued action sequences and special effects. Unfortunately, like every other movie based on a video game to date, it simply ignores everything in the video game that could have made it unique and interesting.

[Photos © Disney Enterprises Inc. and Jerry Bruckheimer Inc.]