Prince of Per­sia: The Sands of Time

This is an excit­ing time for video games. As they grow into their role as a glob­al­ly rel­e­vant cul­tur­al pow­er­house, their influ­ence is begin­ning to extend in all direc­tions. The likes of Neill Blomkamp, Matthew Vaughn and Edgar Wright are har­bin­gers of a new and dis­tinct video game aes­thet­ic at work in the film indus­try, as the first gen­er­a­tion of con­sole kids begins to find its voice. Mean­while, games devel­op­ers absorb the lessons of nar­ra­tive and char­ac­ter learned at the feet of filmmakers.

None of which is evi­dent in Prince of Per­sia: The Sands of Time, an old-fash­ioned adap­ta­tion of the action-adven­ture game that fails to cap­ture either the dra­mat­ic excite­ment of cin­e­ma or the vis­cer­al fun of gaming.

Buffed up beef­cake Jake Gyl­len­haal plays the epony­mous Prince, a for­mer street rat tak­en in by the roy­al fam­i­ly. Grown into man­hood, Das­tan may be an uncouth brawler but his no-non­sense man­ner and keen mind has also seen him become the King’s favourite. Dastan’s rela­tion­ship with his half-broth­ers (played by Toby Kebbel and Richard Coyle) is sin­cere­ly felt, but the fam­i­ly dynam­ic is destroyed when Das­tan is framed for his father’s murder.

Forced on the run with a spoiled princess, Tam­i­na (Gem­ma Arter­ton), the guardian of a sacred dag­ger, Das­tan is pitched into a world of vast super­nat­ur­al forces and giv­en the pow­er to con­trol time itself. The pair must return to Tamina’s holy city and stop the real mur­der­er from destroy­ing the world.

The prob­lems with Prince of Per­sia come thick and fast. Any­body who has seen The Lion King or Aladdin will instant­ly recog­nise the real cul­prit when intro­duced to Ben Kingsley’s uncle Nizam, and will spend the rest of the film won­der­ing why the sup­pos­ed­ly smart Das­tan takes so long to fig­ure it out.

As expect­ed in this kind of block­buster, the char­ac­ters are thin­ly drawn and reduc­tive­ly anachro­nis­tic, designed to appeal to Amer­i­can teenagers and thus sure to irri­tate every­body else with their arro­gant wise­crack­ing and smug ban­ter. In this respect, the film is far clos­er in atti­tude to Sands of Time sequel The War­rior With­in, which redesigned the char­ac­ter to make him less like an agile Arab nin­ja, and more like a spoiled West­ern brat.

But the real prob­lem in this emp­ty cin­e­ma of spec­ta­cle is that there are hard­ly any arrest­ing images or mem­o­rable moments. The time-bend­ing spe­cial effects are sec­ond rate, and despite a few nods to gamers, the park­our-heavy action sequences offer lit­tle in the way of inno­va­tion, before devolv­ing into an all-CG show­down that might have been fun if it came with a con­troller and the option to decide the out­come for your­self. Alas, con­ver­gence hasn’t quite got that far yet.

Jake Gyl­len­haal does every­thing asked of him in a phys­i­cal­ly demand­ing role, but he sim­ply doesn’t have the mate­r­i­al to work with to cre­ate a last­ing impres­sion – Das­tan is no Jack Sparrow.

Else­where, Alfred Moli­na is lum­bered with a faint­ly racist stereo­type as an untrust­wor­thy Arab busi­ness­man, there to dis­tract par­ents with jokes about tax dodg­ing. Gem­ma Arter­ton is made to look rather plain in a series of ungain­ly close-ups. And Ben Kings­ley fol­lows the Antho­ny Hop­kins route of giv­ing the same line-read­ing in every film no mat­ter what the script calls for.

Per­haps most dis­ap­point­ing is that Mike Newell pre­vi­ous­ly direct­ed the best of the Har­ry Pot­ter movies – the one with the clean­est nar­ra­tive and clear­est sense of the demands of cin­e­mat­ic sto­ry­telling. But he’s dropped a giant dud here. Four cred­it­ed scriptwrit­ers speaks to the prob­lems inher­ent in a project of this size – Newell has sim­ply found him­self out­matched by mate­r­i­al that lacks a coher­ent vision or spark of inspiration.

No doubt chil­dren will enjoy it. It’s loud, brash, rel­a­tive­ly fleet of foot and light on romance. But it sets the bar des­per­ate­ly low for the sum­mer block­busters to fol­low. It isn’t good enough. We need to demand more.