Finally!

Posted by Shane Woodward, on June 11, 2010

I first saw the movie trailer for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time back in November, and right away I had a gut feeling that this would be the movie to break the very long chain of bad to absolutely horrendous video game adaptations. Since it's release, the film has received mixed reviews. For the most part, viewers have found it fun, and critics have hated it. Despite the less than stellar press, and the growing knot in my gut warning me that I was in for a let-down, my fiance and I hit the theatre last night for a light night showing, and am I ever glad we did.

I loved it!

Before we go any further, let's get a few things out on the table. First of all, you have to set the right expectations going into this movie. Are you going to see the next Academy Award winning movie of the year? No. Absolutely not. PoP (Prince of Persia) is not one of those movies, and it isn't trying to be. What you are going to see is a movie that took a big risk by basing itself on IP from a video game, particularly given Hollywood's unbelievably long track record of flops in this regard.

In the end, what we got was a very entertaining summer swashbuckler, loosely based on a video game, that didn't take itself too seriously.

What made it good:

Jake Gyllenhaal: Few people could have imagined him in this role. Most of you know Jake as Jack Twist from Brokeback Mountain, though we geeks know him as Donnie Darko. I was more than a bit worried about how he'd pull of the role. It turns out that I didn't need to be, since he was absolutely brilliant. Granted, a large part of this was good writing, but it's his on camera charisma (where the hell did that come from?) that turned him into this very likable hero that (like the movie) doesn't take himself too seriously. The only thing his performance left me wishing was that he'd been cast instead of Orlando Bloom (who wasn't so likable) in Pirates of the Caribbean. Maybe even the Lord of the Rings trilogy, though an elf might have been a stretch. I guess I just don't like Orlando Bloom.

IP Execution: Part of what makes video game adaptations fail so miserably is that they try to force elements into the movie that just don't work on the big screen in a believable manner. Doom, and the Mortal Kombat movies are prime examples of this. In the Mortal Kombat video game, Liu Kang's bicycle kick (just 1 of about 1000 examples from this movie) doesn't detract from the realism, because there isn't any. When you try to execute that on screen, it just looks stupid. Is there some unwritten rule that movies based on video games have to be cheesy? While Karl Urban was pretty good in Doom, The Rock? Seriously? I mean seriously?

Prince of Persia, on the other hand, takes from the IP what will work on the big screen without forcing things in that won't. Most impressive of all was that they didn't overuse the gimmick (in this case the dagger that reverses time) that both the game and movie were based upon. That would have been a very easy trap to fall into, particularly since it was the gameplay mechanic that set the franchise apart other action games at the time. For movie adaptations to work in the future (I'm talking to you Mass Effect and World of Warcraft), they'll need to borrow this formula to succeed.

Everything Else: PoP wasn't without it's faults, but for the most part, those faults were few and far between. The film's leading lady, Gemma Arterton, was probably the weak link in the chain in terms of casting, though she wasn't all that bad. What she lacked in terms of character depth, she made up for in on camera appeal, and in many cases, that's what these roles are all about to begin with. The remaining cast, highlighted by Ben Kingsley and Alfred Molina were very solid.

Conclusion:

I don't know why the critics have been so hard on this movie. Ignoring for a moment that this movie is based on a video game, and measuring it as a summer swashbuckler, it probably fell short of, say, the first Pirates of the Caribbean, but so has every other swashbuckler ever made. If you enjoyed anything about the first two Mummy movies (nobody really enjoyed the 3rd) then you'll love this movie because it's better by a mile. A very enjoyable popcorn flick that competently blends Aladdin's morals with Indiana Jones' light heartedness into a movie that's very much worth the price of admission. That it's the first good execution of a video game ever on the big screen makes it that much better.