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FollowBy: Movie Critic-guest contributor
Making a movie based on a video game is an uphill challenge. If you take a look at the quality of movies that have come from such sources you’ll see a wide variety of failures. Super Mario Brothers was the first of the English speaking adaptations and it came out in 1993. It was so bad that Nintendo vowed never again to allow any of their properties to be made into a movie. Street Fighter came out in 1994 and all but buried the career of Jean-Claude Van Damme, and unfortunately was the last movie the versatile Raul Julia would star in before passing away. Mortal Kombat and the Resident Evil movies are the best of the bunch because they are at least watchable, but they are not high quality movies. With the release of Prince of Persia under superstar producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s (Pirates of the Caribbean, C.S.I.) watchful eye, Disney is hoping to change all that.
The movie opens with the introduction of Dastan, a street urchin who catches the King’s eye after performing a heroic deed. He’s adopted into the King’s family, and becomes a Prince of Persia. Sixteen years later Dastan, now played by a ripped Jake Gyllenhaal (Zodiac, Brokeback Mountain), is part of an invading force seeking to overthrow the holy city of Alamut. During the invasion Dastan comes to find a dagger with mystical abilities that allows him to go back a few seconds in time and change the past. Unfortunately he doesn’t discover this unusual ability until after he’s blamed for murdering his adoptive father the King, and forced to go on the run with the beautiful Princess of Alamut Tamina played by Gemma Arterton (Quantum of Solace, Clash of the Titans). Throughout the rest of the movie Dastan tries to clear his name, and find out the truth as to why his father was murdered.
Unlike a lot of video game movies Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time manages to find a decent balance between story and action. If you’ve ever played the video game you’ll know that it involves a lot of jumping, quick reflexes, and solving of puzzles, and this movie manages to incorporate all of that. At times you’ll wish you had a controller in your hand so you can play along with the action. Jake Gyllenhaal is not the obvious choice for playing a Persian Prince (in fact it has caused a lot of controversy and has some Persians accusing Hollywood of ‘white-washing’ the main characters), but he handles the role well and with one look at his muscled body it’s obvious he prepared for it. Sir Ben Kingsley (Shutter Island, The House of Sand and Fog) does an admirable job as the main foil, but it is Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2, The Pink Panther 2) who steals the show as the business/con man Sheik Amar.
Overall Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a decent movie. In fact it is probably the best video game adaptation ever made. Not that it has a lot of competition. It keeps you entertained from start to finish, and gives you the rush you were probably looking for when you decided to go see it. If video game movies have indeed turned the corner, like comic book movies did in 2000 with the release of X-Men, then you can surely expect to see more money being put into their production to avoid another disaster such as Max Payne. Before we get our hopes up however we do have a third sequel to Resident Evil to put up with before the end of the year.
Whenever somebody tells me about a movie I’ve never heard of that I absolutely must see, I’m ceptical. Most of the time the movie turns out to be some artistic piece that doesn’t interest me at all (Willem Defoe’s latest Anti-Christ is a perfect example of this), but sometimes they’re right. There are usually a few word of mouth movies that do incredible at the box office each year as well, such as Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project, and District 9, but the following movies are the ones that didn’t get the word out well enough, and in some cases have fallen into obscurity.
