Goodish, but not great
Cinema
Daniel Carey
I’M too young to remember, but apparently Frenchman Michel Platini was the first ever footballer to be described by Eamon Dunphy as ‘a good player, but not a great player’. Dunphy is said to have made that observation before the 1984 European Championships. France went on to win that competition, Platini won the Golden Boot as top scorer and was the team’s outstanding player.
Dunphy’s famous phrase – since repeated on numerous occasions – popped into my head while watching Mike Newell’s ‘Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time’. King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup) is paying his adopted son Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) a back-handed compliment – he has proven himself smart enough to launch a surprise attack in battle, but fallen short of greatness by not preventing the conflict.
Soon, Dastan (a commoner taken in as a boy by the king) has bigger things to worry about. Accused of a crime he didn’t commit, he ends up on the run with the beautiful Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) and in possession of a dagger capable of turning back time. Ben Kingsley pops up as the king’s untrustworthy brother – a long way from Gandhi, and a reminder that accepting money in exchange for access to your ex-husband isn’t the worst thing a minor member of the royal family can do.
The dagger with time-travelling potential plays a role not unlike the (only once deployed) Omega 13 in ‘Galaxy Quest’, allowing the protagonist to go back 60 seconds – or, under certain circumstances – much longer. Mercifully, it is only used sparingly.
The action sequences include sword fights and death-defying stunts, but there’s no blood – the movie has a 12A certificate, after all. We also get chases, back-flips and secret passageways with shades of ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’. Dastan runs up a wall in order to fell a man on horseback from behind. He does a bit of leaping from heights and across caverns. It’s nonsense, but fairly good fun for all that. Mind you, we do find ourselves in ‘Transformers’ territory towards the end, with the sound and fury one expects from producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
The locations are stunning, and Gyllenhaal has a good face. He also does a fine English accent, but why it was felt the character should speak in those tones is a little hard to fathom.
Given the target audience, the plot is more than a little complicated, even if it does make a kind of sense. There’s an invasion prompted by a belief in the existence of ‘weapons’ forges’, the Persian equivalent of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs. The old king is obviously ticking off George W Bush when he tells his son: “You’ve got to have more than indications to occupy a holy city.”
I haven’t played the video game on which ‘Prince of Persia’ is based, but I can’t imagine monologues on the illegality of the Iraq War play a major part in it. Mind you, given how terrible such adaptations have been (‘Max Payne’, anybody?), paying little heed to the source material may be no bad thing.
Dialogue is not the film’s strong suit – nor is humour. That said, one member of the audience at the screening I attended got a big laugh out of the ostrich-racing in the Valley of the Slaves – ‘Every Tuesday and Thursday’, and ‘easy to fix’, Dastan is told. But in this viewer’s opinion, any show whose best line is ‘You can’t organise an ostrich race with just one ostrich’ can’t rely on its script for a thumbs up.
Overall, it’s a goodish film, but not a great film.
Rating 5 out of 10
