Photo: Andrew Cooper, SMPSP
Jake Gyllenhaal pwns the enemy, not the audience.
It would be easy to go into
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
believing cinema is dead—and even easier to believe after coming out of it.
Bear in mind, this is one of those movies in which time occasionally flows backward, in just such a way as to foster some hope that even the deadest of beloved things might be restored to life and to reassuring permanence. Also bear in mind that Prince of Persia is a very stupid example of one of those movies, not least of all because it’s based on a video game.
Knee-jerk cinema purists will feel threatened and aggrieved. Well, they needn’t. Prince of Persia is a fine example of cinematic vitality because it reminds us that movies are very good at avoiding adaptation from video games. They manage to be dumb all on their own.
Here we are, with a hairy, hunky Jake Gyllenhaal and a pretty, pouty Gemma Arterton, in an epic adventure about a dagger that is also a time machine. Indeed, the sands of time are not metaphorical here. They are actual grains of sand, without which the dagger can’t do its thing. The literalness seems important for the baseline level of subtlety it establishes, by which supporting performances from Ben Kingsley and Alfred Molina may charitably be measured. With so many Brits around, including director Mike Newell, perhaps it is perfectly fair for Gyllenhaal to redress his not seeming very Persian by affecting the official adventure-movie British accent.
Prince of Persia does contain some concessions to old-fashioned movie storytelling of yore. It harkens, however clumsily, back to those romantic adventure serials that influenced George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who in turn influenced a generation of video-game enthusiasts to shrug off the cultural dilution on display here. Thus, stock scenes of agile, impish street urchins scampering around Middle Eastern bazaars evolve into stock scenes of agile, impish warriors battling among computer-generated Middle Eastern rooftops right before our jaundiced eyes.
Speaking of jaundiced, everything and everyone in Prince of Persia has a disconcerting golden glow. Has there been an epidemic of hepatitis? Is that what all this hostility is really about? If the protagonists seem too hesitant to kiss each other, coming close more times than is charming, maybe it’s because they have real health concerns. Anyway, it can’t be easy to make these two beautiful people sometimes hard to look at, but Newell somehow has done it. And if his camera folk and editors tried to help, they didn’t much succeed: The movie is full of weird framings and awkward cuts.
Which goes to show, paradoxically, that cinema can’t be dead. Not while other media, like video games, continue to try and become cinema—in this case, by actually scripting in all those dull explanatory parts you’d normally skip over with a push on your controller. Sure, Prince of Persia is watchable, but only as a game that’s been rendered unplayable.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Directed by Mike Newell
With Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton, Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina
Dreamcatcher, Regal Stadium 14
115 min.
PG-13
