Perhaps my expectations were too high for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. I expected a big dumb fantasy epic, but instead got a boring slog in a sandbox. Yeah, lots of money was spent on CGI sand and time-turning mystical daggers, but the money would have been better spent on a script rewrite, an adrenaline injection and character development as the flat narrative goes nowhere and the characters are wholly uninteresting.
As an adaptation of a video game, the Prince of Persia team seems to have concerned themselves with appealing to the scrutinizing eyes of the game’s fanbase without much concern for bringing the one-time digital characters to life in a way audiences that weren’t familiar with the game could relate. It’s a mistake that’s becoming more common as of late as some game and comic properties don’t directly translate to the big screen and need a little something extra to work in feature film form. It seems filmmakers are falling out of “adapting” and just sticking to whatever it is they started with, no matter its ability to crossover.
I’ve been told this film “adaptation” hues close to the storyline of the video game, though I can’t say for sure having never played it. The story centers on Dastan (Gyllenhaal), an adopted son of the Persian King Sharaman, with no blood right to the throne thogh he still remains faithful to his adoptive father’s wishes as a member of the Persian army. Dastan’s story takes a turn upon the discovery of a jeweled dagger following the taking of the film’s fictitious city of Alamut, a victory that soon ends with the death of the king and Dastan as the assumed murderer.
While on the run, the dagger becomes the story. Using special sand to turn back time, once Dastan learns of the dagger’s importance he and the Alamut princess Tamina (Arterton) join forces to do everything they can to keep it out of the hands of those that mean to use it for evil. And so the story goes as the dagger changes hands between Dastan and Tamina a number of times, Alfred Molina shows up for a few forced laughs and ostrich races, Ben Kingsley stares menacingly into the camera and a swirl of sand envelopes the film’s climax all before ending just as you would expect it to. When boiled down into a paragraph it doesn’t sound all that bad, but when stretched into a nearly two-hour feature it drags on and on.
The biggest problem with all of this is the lack of climactic moments. The film flat lines the whole way through and the only reason the trailers even promise any kind of action is because they are able to condense a few promising action sequences only to have you learn they go nowhere inside the actual film.
As a cohesive story this film works better than say the bumbling and stumbling Clash of the Titans from earlier this year, but at least that film tried to inject some energy, which is where I managed to have some fun with it. It had giant scorpions, winged horses, blind witches, etc. while Prince of Persia has this silly dagger and some goofy looking ostriches. There is simply no oomph to the story. It just sits there, sinking into the sand with every minute that passes by.
Gyllenhaal is not a nightmare as an action star, but this wasn’t the role to test his abilities and Arterton continues to shine as an on screen beauty, but she lacks any kind of real presence and is yet to truly show much promise. Granted, neither was helped by the screenplay written by Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard based on Jordan Mechner’s original video game series as it seemed to play things safe and use only the most generic of dialogue in the process. I also was left to wonder just how much director Mike Newell brought to this feature because, as I have already said, it lacks in energy and excitement with camerawork that just seems intent on making sure everything is in frame rather than bringing the audience deeper into the film.
Prince of Persia is just a comatose bore. Very little is tried in terms of the story in hopes the big action pieces will make up for the lifeless moments in between. Molina’s comedic interjections aren’t all that funny and the villain never feels like much of a threat, which made for a film I just wanted to have end rather than sit through another scene before the inevitable triumphant conclusion.
