Jake Gyllenhaal leaps across the screen as Prince Dastan in Jerry Bruckheimer’s new action adventure Prince of Persia:  the Sands of Time.  The film is based on a long running video games series that originated all the way back to Atari.  As a fan of the original game series, they did a great job of capturing the feel and look of the game.  There are a lot of homages to the game that I believe many fans will easily spot.  The film expands on the original story of the game by adding depth to the once nameless prince and more characters, at sometimes too many.

Jake Gyllenhaal does a great job as Prince Dastan but it is Alfred Molina who really steals the show as the ostrich race mogul Sheik Amar. I felt Ben Kingsley was drastically underused, being that he’s such an incredible actor and an important character.  One of the strong points of this film is the action but what really disappointed me was the use of the Dagger of Time.  In the game, the Dagger serves as a way to redo mistakes but more or less it offers some amazing visual effects, like seeing a floor or wall that crumbled sending you to your death and then see the crumbling be rewound and pieced back together.  With Jerry Bruckheimer behind this project, it was hard not to expect it but I won’t count that against the film because of my fandom.  The weakest point of this film is the Prince and Princess Tamina’s (Gemma Arterton) love story that seem to drag the film along.  One scene that really annoyed me was when Tamina has to put the dagger back to the source of its power ending any possibility of it being used for evil, but  the princess can’t help but be drawn to the princes’ lips and then “Oh no” the dagger gets stolen.  It just seemed like a really cheap way to keep the story going.

Also this film has too many characters, Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time revisits the same mistakes made by Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End by having far too many characters than is needed which leads to the juggling of plots and subplots.  I like Alfred Molina’s character but he could have easily been scrapped along with at least 6 others.

This film had the potential to be something great but somewhere the story just gets lost within its-self.  But overall I have to say I am happy with how the game was translated into the movie.   The Prince was awesome, the feeling and look were there, but all that was missing was a decent story to make this the perfect video game movie.  This film would have been fine as a one man that “stands alone ” rather than the pirate-esque caper with more than 20 characters.  I would definitely like to see this property be given another shot but with a different writer that’s not trying to recreate the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

Grade: C

• Tweet