Dosty Glory reviews "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" 2010

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

It didn’t feel like a video game movie, for what that’s worth.  Though it was somewhat comical to watch a controversial Oscar nominee do brown-face.  Wonder if anyone told him that playing a different race does get you quite the same acclaim as playing “differently-abled.”  Perhaps he just watched Tropic Thunderand didn’t catch the parody.

            Personally, I liked Aladdinmuch more as a cartoon than live-action, though Robin Williams never gave him the power to climb walls using arrows that can pierce stone.  At least, not that I remember.  Not even a member of the A-Team could hop that far unassisted!  As Jake Gyllenhaal darted in and out of huts, crashing through crowds and interrupting a harem, all that was missing was a catchy tune and a mischievous monkey.  Well, that and a believable front man.  But hey, animation has come a long way, even back in 1992.

            In this telling, the rascally street-rat doesn’t find a genie, but instead gets adopted as a boy by the Persian king and later finds a magical, time traveling sword that he must guard so it doesn’t destroy mankind and ruin his time with the sexy princess.  I know, I know: why didn’t they just stick with the simple realism of the Cave of Wonders?  That’s modern Disney for you.

            I don’t see any problem with the magical sword of time sand, and really hope this isn’t a fancy legend that I am shamefully clueless of.  There’s no reason a plot can’t be fantastical.  The fantastical does become a problem, however, when it defies logic out of laziness and not some strand of creativity.  Drama is based on a series of actions, a line of cause and effect.  The line of action presented here is a lot of effect, with weak cause.  The King sees Dastan (Gyllenhaal) protecting another beggar child as a boy, admires his bravery and decides to adopt him – what?!  The man already has two SONS, why the blip is he picking up strangers?  This leads to a whole heap of other “why?!”s that I don’t have the energy to pluck down, mainly because it dangerously raises my blood pressure.  The real mind bender is that there was no reason to construct such flimsy premise action, the direct route would have been simpler and required less wiggling and wrangling.

            Gyllenhaal is not an actor who has gripped me much in the past, but I don’t know what the hell he was doing here.  Bad enough that Dastan as a character is written to be a dope with anything outside of invading holy cities (which I still think he only succeeded at because his opponents were even dumber than he was), but somehow Gyllenhaal added a level of shallowness that made me wonder if he read the script or someone drew pictures and he strung together sentences with the cues. 

            Maybe that last point was a little extreme, but it was rough to watch and highlighted by the comparative performances by two great men: Ben Kingsley and Alfred Molina.  At first it’s difficult to understand why they are in a movie like this, considering their acting caliber.  But that’s part of why I think they’re both so amazing.  Not only is this an easy/fun paycheck for them, but they are also the best parts of the movie!  They take their parts as seriously as they deserve, embodying the characters without becoming foolish at the hands of the writing or the genre.  Hopefully Gyllenhaal paid attention when these two modern legends were stomping around set, with the chance that maybe in his next film he can look like he at least somewhat knows what the hell he’s up to.  

            Lastly, there’s the length.  Long films don’t necessarily scare me away.  They do irritate me, however, when I realize that by cutting out all the sweep-shots and repeated footage, the movie would only be about forty-minutes long.  Not that the desert isn’t a tempting scape to get caught up in.  Lawrence of Arabia is one of my top five favorite films, and I wouldn’t cut out a single scene of him wandering through the sand.  The main difference here of course being that David Lean was trekking folks through the actual desert, and this movie reminded me of one of the original Windows desktop images.  It’s the trouble of our rollicking technologies: they spend a stack of money to make something that looks like a video game.  Which, I suppose in this case, is apt.

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