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Review: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Here’s the main problem with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – it’s already been done about as impeccably as can be done in its 2003 video game incarnation. The movie never comes close to achieving the greatness that that game achieved; then again, Sands of Time is quite literally one of the ten greatest gaming experiences ever, so failing to reach so high a bar isn’t so bad for this movie.

What Sands of Time the film is, however, is a serviceable action-adventure that lasts too long and relies too heavily on very ugly CG and up-close camera angles.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dastan, the whitebread Prince of Persia adopted by the king when he was seen defying a guard reenacting the opening from Disney’s Aladdin. He grows up into a warrior along with his two brothers and shares a close Boromir/Faramir relationship split three ways.

The white-washing of the Persian cast is certainly something to be examined; however this is a movie that features magical time-sand daggers and Paul Bettany’s evil monk dude from The DaVinci Code. It’s not too much of a stretch to look at the setting as a fantasy Ancient Persia, a la Lord of the Rings or M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender Apology for The Happening.

Well, it’s not too big of a deal, until you start trying to shoehorn modern-day political stuff into the mix. See, the Persians are marching onto this Holy City of Alderaan (ruled by Jimmy Smits) which is rumored, according to Colin Powell, to contain weapons of mass destruction. It’s this hunt for weapons that becomes the impetus for the Persian invasion. It’s all very unsubtle, and there are political buzzwords namedropped here and there that normally would’ve been simple lip service in a movie like this, but when you announce your Iraq WMD theme so blatantly at the onset of the film they become very jarring. There’s WMDs, torture, spies, secret mercenaries, and even an extended argument over whether to give a criminal a trial lest he have “a stage for his sedition.” Is Alfred Molina’s comic-relief sheikh’s anti-tax and anti-bureaucracy spiel the rantings of a Tea Party madman? With these kinds of ham-handed references, it’s hard to defend the fantasy setting and white-washed cast.

That aside, Gyllenhaal is fine as the rogue-ish, Han Solo-ish, Jack Sparrow-ish Dastan, but never really becomes much more than that. There’s also Gemma Arterton as the Princess Tamina from the city of Alma-whatever, who spends way too much of the movie in her silly exposition mode from the awful Clash of the Titans. However, when she’s out of this mode and trading barbs with Dastan, she’s more bearable. The chemistry between the two leads is mostly bland, and when they finally start to click it feels like hours have gone by (rather than the two hours advertised). Alfred Molina is upstaged by his flightless birds, which I’ll get into below. Ben Kingsley is here as the villain (“spoilers,” I guess, since that’s a “twist”) but doesn’t really do much of anything. He’s still trapped in an Uwe Boll/Bloodrayne circle of hell, I suppose. How he avoided being in Dungeon Siege we’ll never know.

The movie’s other star, unfortunately, is the appalling CG. It looks and feels like something out of the Mummy franchise, and there’s a lot of it. Did that wooden oil thing at the beginning of the movie need to be a hideous CG creation? Did so many scenes feel utterly fake and joyless because of the utterly fake and joyless CG? There are brief (brief!) scenes that are actually quite gorgeous and well done, and a few shots in actual, real-life tangible desert environments that feel nice, but most of the time the movie takes place on tiny, artificial-looking sets with a greenscreen backdrop.

CG is also used way too liberally in the action sequences, and this is perhaps the movie’s most glaring misstep: the lack of any significant parkour action. I’d been looking forward to this movie after seeing parkour and freerunning in the likes of District B13 or even Casino Royale. Sands of Time the game introduced many gamers to beautiful, fluid acrobatics that have yet to be repeated in a game save for maybe Mirror’s Edge (goofily, at best). During shooting, we heard promises of parkour and wallrunning sequences – none of that made it to film. It’s all either done with rubbery CG stuntmen or accompanied by shoddy, up-close editing and cutting. Every now and again you’ll get a cool leap or jump, only to sink back in your chair in boredom as CG Gyllenhaal slides down CG sand tidal waves and crumbling CG arches.

The sword fighting action is just as bad; the camera is basically kept on top of and inside the fight the whole time rather than pulling back and letting us see the whole thing. It’s all too often a blurry, incoherent mess. This kind of thing is especially detrimental to the Nolanverse Batman movies or Bay’s Transformers flicks  – when are action directors going to realize that we don’t want our heads spinning during a fight scene? When will they realize we’re watching a movie to (gasp) see something?

One quick bit about the sound: this movie is fucking LOUD. It seemed like every fight scene is punctuated with sword clangs and whooshes like machine-gun fire. It’s as if the mixer took the foley work and then stomped on his console two or three times for added oomph. It got pretty distracting.

The movie also overstays its welcome by a good fifteen or twenty minutes. There’s an extended scene that takes place at an ostrich race (read: podrace) and, hilarious as ostriches are, people don’t come to this movie to watch ostriches go at it. The movie also wraps up (spoiler alert) by rewinding time, Next-style, to the beginning and while I appreciate touches like that, the whole “rewind time back to the beginning of the story thing” was executed much more elegantly in the game. Thankfully they don’t try to clumsily set up a sequel/trilogy (thrillogy) at the end like every other goddamned movie in existence.

Overall, though, I was entertained. I mentioned the Mummy films earlier, and I think that description is apt – shitty CG, but diversionary fun nonetheless. There’s nothing amazing here, but there’s nothing outwardly offensive either. However, considering the title’s gaming pedigree and apparent expense, I was hoping for a bit more. Given its flailing at the box office a sequel’s unlikely, which is a bit of a shame – fix these problems and I’d see another Gyllenhaal Leapy McChesty flick.

BOTTOM LINE: better than Clash of the Titans, not as good as the first Pirates of the Caribbean. Decent, but long and boring, but sometimes fun too. ‘Hassansins’ is an incredibly stupid name. Ostriches!

SEE ALSO: Jordan Mechner and the Making of the Original Prince of Persia

6.5/10