Movie review in the Friday, May 28 Oregonian....
"Prince of Persia" turns into noisy, "Mummy"-sequel nonsense fairly early in its run -- but it starts well.
After some voiceover narration blathering about people being "linked across time" and "destiny" and it being "a long time ago" and all that rot, we meet the Persian army ("fierce in battle, wise in victory") as they're about to invade a holy city. In the movie's amusingly ham-fisted attempt at social commentary, we learn the Persian king has faulty intelligence that the city is producing weapons of mass destruction -- i.e., really cool swords -- and so he's sent his three sons to put a stop to it and string a "Mission Accomplished" banner across the parapets, or something.
The invasion of the city is a swashbuckling good time. The king's adopted son, former street orphan Prince Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal), leads a rough-hewn black-ops squad into the city over the back gate. I liked the idea of this two-fisted, bickering and quite possibly drunk crew of warriors, and for a while, the movie's a fun throwback to the sword-and-sandal B-pictures I loved as a kid -- with lots of leaping and smirking and quipping and bombastic music, marked by a sort of goofy self-aware old-Hollywood charm in which "exotic" is an English accent. (It's a sort of Cost Plus World Market fake exotica.) I half expected young Tony Curtis to pop up somewhere with an apocryphal pompadour.
Unfortunately, the movie's charm starts wearing off right around the time the holy city's Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) enters the picture. Dastan is suddenly framed for murder -- and without a moment's discussion, he and the captive princess go on the lam while also trying to protect a mystical dagger that can turn back time.
After that, the movie turns into a series of frenetic but boringly staged chase scenes, with interludes of boy-girl bickering and double-crossing and CGI and increasingly hard-to-follow exposition about the magic dagger and how it works. The movie never really changes its rhythm -- so everything kind of looks and sounds and feels the same until it finally just grinds you down with its sheer dull busy-ness, much like a "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequel.
Walt Disney Pictures and producer Jerry Bruckheimer adapted "Prince of Persia" (subtitle: "The Sands of Time") from a video-game series that's been around since 1989. Given that Disney and the Bruck successfully adapted the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie from an old boat ride featuring animatronic puppets, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, this time around, they didn't add enough of the crucial ingredient -- humor -- that made the first "Pirates" work so well.
The "banter" between the lovely (if decidedly non-Persian) Gyllenhaal and Arterton is boring; their chemistry feels forced. Director Mike Newell ("Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire") stages action scenes that are competent and fast-moving, but also generic -- he just isn't particularly interesting as choreographer of large-scale mayhem. And the mythology of the supernatural dagger is both over-explained and mildly confusing, to the degree that the film's climactic battle just feels like a bunch of computer-generated white noise.
Some of this might be forgiven if "Prince of Persia" provided Jack Sparrow levels of quotable comic relief, but that character simply doesn't exist in this dojo. Alfred Molina gets a few laughs as an "entrepreneur" making his living running ostrich races, but he and his wacky knife-throwing crew aren't in the movie enough to turn the tide.
In a candid promotional interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Newell jokingly shared his own fears about the picture, saying: "Making it homogenous is a terrible danger. If I'm in the mood to be hyper self-critical, I would say perhaps I allowed [the movie] to become a little homogenous, but I'm not sure. Then again, I hope people are being entertained at such speed, with such vigor and inventiveness that I'm actually wrong about that fact. Or that they don't notice."
Unfortunately, I noticed. And I suspect I won't be alone in noticing.
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(116 min., rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action) Grade: C
'Prince of Persia' (The Oregonian, Friday, May 28, 2010)
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