Over the summer we often have a couple of games based on cinema’s mega blockbusters, and more often than not these turn out... well... not particularly well. Nine times out of ten they’re lame cash-ins by unsuccessful branches of big developers who are trying to prove they’re still worth something. Now Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (loosely based on the 2003 video game) has gone the other way and has - despite having a decent director, producer and cast - turned out in a similarly lame way.
The Prince of Persia in question is a weirdly British street urchin who is adopted by the king of Persia for throwing an apple at a guards head and running away. Fast forward some twenty years and he’s become the weirdly British Prince Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) who, during a not-really-epic battle in the sacred city of Alamut, comes across the Dagger of Time. Various events unfold – the big one being that Dastan is framed for his father’s murder – and he ends up on the run with the Princess of Alamut, Tamina (Gemma Arteton), where he accidentally triggers the dagger’s magical, time-reversing power. A few more things happen (there’s an unnecessary trip to the ostrich races and a funny (annoying) man in a turban complains about taxes) and, after the bad guy is “revealed” as Dastan’s nefarious-looking Uncle Nizam (Ben Kingsley), he decides to help Tamina take the dagger back to where it belongs; although not without some more unnecessary stuff padding out the story in-between.
It’s this superfluous padding out that brings Prince of Persia down; the core story is simple enough, as a summer blockbuster should be, but too many sub-plots and minor characters are brought in and they just get in the way. Because of this the relationship between the leads, Dastan and Tamina, never gets properly fleshed out, and Dastan’s relationship with his brothers is barely even touched on. Really, the only relationship that seems to have any depth is the one between the man in a turban and someone who follows him around throwing knives; and chances are you won’t remember their names ten minutes after the film has ended.
Still, maybe that’s a bit of a blessing in disguise, because what little we do see of the Prince beyond his running, jumping, flipping and sword-swinging talents suggests that he ticks every irritating Disney-hero box possible without bursting into song every fifteen minutes. Almost every utterance is dripping with cringe-worthy smarm. Even when one of the characters dies and he’s confronted by someone grieving their loss by asking him if they’d told him the recently deceased’s story, he bluntly replies “Yes, you have” and walks away. He’s utterly unlikable and Gyllenhaaal’s lazy performance, which is essentially him strutting and smirking in-between dispensing his smug one-liners (complete with a grating British accent throughout), doesn’t help matters.
Although it’s probably unfair to merely highlight Gyllenhaaaal’s character and performance because, in truth, very few of the characters stand out. Arteton occasionally tries with Tamina and sometimes there is a genuine spunk about her, but this is inconsistent with the typical damsel-in-distress role she usually ends up playing when some big nasty men show up. She looks quite nice, though. Dastan’s princely brothers have an annoying habit of swapping sides every half an hour without any obvious reason and they’re performed with the same dodgy accents that Gyllenhaaaaal adopted, and Ben Kingsley’s Nizam just seems a little bored. The only character that actually seems to be enjoying himself is Alfred Molina’s Sheik Amar (the aforementioned man in a turban), and so most of the films humour does end up coming from him – although for the most part it’s a slightly weird, perhaps more adult humour (there’s a strong suggestion that he has sex with an ostrich) that will go over the head of most of the 12A/PG-13 audience.
Since the humour is maybe a little misjudged and none of the characters are particularly fun or likable, Prince of Persia’s action had to compensate – which it does, if only a little. The few free-running sequences are suitably slick and stylishly filmed (there’s a rather smart, video-game inspired angle to some of the shots that should press the right buttons with the game’s fans) and the fight sequences, though a little uninspired, are similarly well done. But everything is littered with pointless and jagged slow-motion that is laughably bad, that makes what is otherwise quite a good-looking film seem cheap and lazy.
All things considered, then, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time doesn’t do much right. The story takes needless detours all over the place, the characters are hard to like and, subsequently, care about, and perfectly good action scenes are spoiled with over-used and stuttering slow-motion effects. Sure, there are some fairly cool camera angles every now and then, but that’s all that sets Prince of Persia apart from the most mediocre of summer blockbusters.
2/5: Although there are brief flashes of style, this is a poorly-written mess of a film that further hinders itself with over-use of poor slow-motion effects.
Still, it could have been worse. There could have been a hilariously unsubtle metaphor for the Gulf War in the first fifteen minutes. Oh.
