With Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Jerry Bruckheimer has produced another popcorn flick of epic proportions and minimal, disposable entertainment. It’s Pirates of the Caribbean without an eccentric character at the center of its swashbuckling flights of brainless fancy.
Unfortunately for us, Johnny Depp can’t be in every frivolous Disney adventure and audiences have to settle instead for the glistening abs and sweaty features of Jake Gyllenhaal. He makes the most of his rugged appeal, often flashing grins amidst a tussled heap of hair with a twinkle in his eye, but there’s something about Gyllenhaal as the nimble charmer that feels off, and I don’t just mean his ethnicity.
A prologue establishes young Aladdin Dastan as a scrappy street urchin foraging for food in the capitol of the Persian Empire until a heroic act catches the eye of the king. Despite his humble beginnings, Dastan is adopted by the royal family and raised as a prince, where he must have learned the ancient, regal discipline of parkour.
Dastan uses his monkey-like abilities to win a decisive victory for Persia and claim his reward, a MacGuffin in the form of a magical dagger filled with magical sand — presumably from the island on “Lost” — that allows the wielder to rewind time up to one minute… magically. This might have come in handy when his father, the king, is killed, but alas Dastan doesn’t learn the mystical powers of the “daggah” until he’s a framed fugitive.
As a video game adaptation, Persia stays fairly true to the core mechanics of its interactive roots, forcing the prince to scamper along stone walls or leap off a perilous plank to evade advancing soldiers. The protagonist’s acrobatics amount to similarly fun yet entirely unnecessary flips, except the movie includes a frustrating lack of control. At least on Xbox you’re able to mash buttons to make the prince use an enemy’s spine as a springboard, instead of passively waiting for him to flip, layout, and double twist out of harm’s way again.
Accompanying him on his travels is Tamina, played by Gemma Arterton, who never manages to wipe the pout from her pretty face. She may look good on marketing materials, but Arterton brings as much to her feisty princess role as a CG-rendered character might. Her “cut scenes” are dull and tedious, and her chemistry with Dastan is utterly lifeless.
In their desert wanderings, they encounter a roguish Sheik Amar (Alfred Molina), a worthless character preoccupied with ostrich races; and a brooding bounty hunter with a snake up his sleeve (literally) and a collection of flashy weaponry. But in all its expository banter and narrow misses, the Mike Newell-directed flick fails because it takes itself too seriously, unlike, say, The Mummy.
Dastan spends much of the trickling hourglass leaping about to prevent his uncle Nizam (Ben Kingsley) from magically making himself king, but the flimsy mythology is lost in avalanches of sand, slow-motion action sequences, and the incessant use of the words “daggah” and “brothah.” By the time Prince of Persia swirls into its overblown, CGI-laden climax, it is already established as a tepid entry into a win-less video game-to-movie genre.
2.5 out of 5.
