Prince of Persia: 3 stars

There were some interesting things about this film. Prince of Persia has many things in its favor, such as great action, a good looking lead actress, and some good British actors like Alfred Molina (Spider-man 2).


But this film flounders in many other respects. Though Jake Gyllenhaal is a good actor, he can’t quite do a British accent. I still stand by my belief that if you want a British accent, get a British actor and not an American who can’t do a genuine one. He does nail the action part down very well, but that can’t move a film along. Other actors are good, like Ben Kingsley who plays Dastan’s uncle, and Alfred Molina who plays a businessman of sorts.

The main place this film flops is in the screenplay. I know this is a Disney film and I shouldn’t expect much out of it, but I always do. I look for the good and the bad in films no matter what it is. And there were a lot of bad things to be found in this screenplay. There were random one-liners that had no premise on what was at hand; some quick shots of the landscape and then one line to the camera and that was it; and a monotonous vocabulary cursed the script with words like “princess” and “destiny” and many others.

This does have many good scenes, though. Again, Alfred Molina does a really good job as a humorous sheik who gives the best lines. The fighting scenes had a few fresh ideas and not reusing stunts from other films. And the music was very well done, however Harry Gregson-William’s score is strangely familiar to his score for The Chronicles of Narnia. But the premise was very predictable, and that could be due to the videogame, I don’t know, I have never played it.

And other problems surround Mike Newell (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), the director, surrounds himself with British accents in an ancient Persian time. Yes, many films do that now, but it doesn’t mean that I am okay with it all. The final problem is that he tries to mimic Ridley Scott’s cinematography by doing so many landscape shots and aerial shots. It just doesn’t come out as good when someone tries to copy Ridley Scott.

So I would say don’t see it. Wait for it to come out on DVD.