Epic Struggles “Prince of Persia” and “John Rabe.”
he producer Jerry Bruckheimer has turned himself into a digital Cecil B. De Mille, a man who was notable for the bizarre and often pointless munificence of his projects. Yet you have to give Bruckheimer credit, of a sort, for successfully coaxing TV-bound families out of their homes with his wildly redundant productions. In the most recent “Pirates of the Caribbean” slosher, he and the director, Gore Verbinski, poured on two hours and fifty minutes’ worth of ice floes, waterfalls, steam, and slime—the cinematic equivalent, for those who actually stayed through the picture, of a banana split with added scoops of Dulce Delish, Adirondack Bear Paw, and Boston Cream Pie. Now, for “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” based on the video game of the same name, Bruckheimer has spent an estimated hundred and fifty million dollars constructing, among other things, sixth-century Persian palaces (or, at least, their façades) in Morocco, complete with towers, terraces, passageways, and arches. Hundreds of hours in museums and libraries were devoted to scrutinizing Persian weaponry and décor, to produce authentic replicas of scabbards and scimitars, not to mention drapes, carpets, and filigreed wall decorations. A movie like this is a boon to honest craftsmen; some workers, instructed to age a newly sewn costume, attacked it with a cheese grater.
Nevertheless, apart from some sensuous Moroccan desert dunes, the movie looks like schlock. The interiors, which were shot in a London studio, are based on Victorian Orientalist paintings in which people in robes crowd around some potentate or a lolling Scheherazade. But why copy second-rate academic works that linger in the unvisited galleries or basements of the world’s museums? These pictures have become, at best, culturally disreputable curiosities. (Hint to moviemakers: if you want to film nineteenth-century Western notions of the Orient, do it as parody, or as something stylized, as Fritz Lang did in 1959, with “The Indian Tomb,” one of his mad final movies.)
In the tradition of De Mille, this ostentatious labor has been marshalled on behalf of a dramatically primitive story. The first “Prince of Persia” video game was created by the designer Jordan Mechner in 1989. Mechner revised the game a number of times, and the movie, which was directed by Mike Newell from a script by Boaz Yakin and Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard, is loosely adapted from the 2003 version. The plot elements include the noble King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup); his seemingly benevolent brother, Nizam (Ben Kingsley); his impatient sons (Toby Kebbell and Richard Coyle); their brother, Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal), a foundling whom Sharaman adopted at a street bazaar; and a magic dagger (the “Dagger of Time”) with a glass hilt. When the hilt is filled with a special sand—a gift of the gods—it can make time run backward. Nizam wants to gain control of the weapon: if he can send life back to an earlier period, he can eliminate his brother’s royal line and become king. Or something like that.
As usual, the ancient world speaks with an Oxbridge accent. Sturdy players, fresh from triumphs in Shaw and Beckett, stand around in turbans and robes and say such lines as “Wise words, little brother” and “In Alamut rests the beating heart of all life.” The classy British diction is yet another luxury item. Even Jake Gyllenhaal, leaping about with a messy wet do and bulging shoulders, speaks like a gent walking down the Strand. Gyllenhaal gets linked up with Gemma Arterton, as Princess Tamina, the guardian of the dagger. Tamina is the kind of sexy, bare-midriff role that Debra Paget specialized in fifty years ago (she was the devastating Sharain in “Omar Khayyam”), though Paget fans will be disappointed that Arterton does nothing comparable to her lethally funny naked-with-diamonds “Snake Dance” in Lang’s “The Indian Tomb.” (Hint to lascivious moviegoers: it’s on YouTube.) Instead, Arterton plays Tamina as a saucy young thing, and she and Gyllenhaal, like every couple in a romantic comedy, snap at each other relentlessly while slowly falling in love. The movie is pitched to adolescents, but the kids in the audience groan when the two draw near yet don’t kiss, only to lock lips, at last, just before fadeout.
For anyone who wants a connection to the movie, that kiss isn’t much to hold on to. “Prince of Persia” is meant purely as light entertainment, but the way it draws on layers of junk is depressing. It’s based on clichés not only from old paintings but from some of the fruitiest and most swollen nineteen-fifties period spectacles; all this material, after passing through video games, now gets loaded back into a production requiring the wealth of corporate kings. For twenty years, audiences have been noticing the similarity between big action and fantasy movies and video games, but “Prince of Persia” goes beyond similarity; it actually feels like a video game. In order to work the dagger, you press a red jewel on the hilt, which suspiciously resembles a button on a game controller. After a while, backward motion ceases, and life goes forward again. The first time this happens, the effect is rather neat. By the third time, you think that the filmmakers have found a convenient way to avoid the difficulties of constructing a plot that makes emotional sense. Is this the future of screenwriting? The quick reversals that add to the fun of a game make nonsense out of the loyalties and desires of flesh-and-blood characters. At the climax, a good part of the plot is rapidly reversed, and you may find yourself wishing that the filmmakers had wiped out everything after the opening titles. Mike Newell has made solid movies—“Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Donnie Brasco”—but what he does here feels more like traffic management than like direction. Even the pop-Orientalist scenes that should be scary fun just skitter off the screen in a rush of action.
