But I digress. Evan nailed the plot, so allow me to try and approach the tone. Prince of Persia has a whole lot of Pirates of the Caribbean in it. There’s whimsy and adventure and danger, but a whole lot of winking too. This is what Clash of the Titans should have been, right down to the snappy, seductive editing.
There is a sequence late in the film where, I kid you not, Gyllenhaal’s prince is dueling with Ben Kingsley, trying to keep a magical dagger from being stuck into what is effectively a giant, canyon-sized time machine. Or something like that. I don’t really know – but that’s the beautiful thing, it doesn’t really matter. The boys fight, the space-time continuum hangs in the balance, then Jake jumps across a chasm, slays a sword-swinging assassin who pounces on him and then plants a wet one on the lips of the girl. He saves his own life, the universe, and gets the girl in less than 30 seconds. It’s a blurry, bristling action film made for a gamer’s ADD.
Prince of Persia is above all a triumph of editing. It moves so briskly – and as Evan said, with such surprising flurries of gravity-defying choreography – that it’s hard to get bored. When it does pause for plot development, it’s Gyllenhaal’s serious acting chops that make the whole I-was-framed-into-betraying-my-family theme work. When it stops for romance, Atherton – who I generally think does little more than given airy sounds to dialogue – is effective as the elusive, hard-to-get conquest. When it stops for the supernatural time-traveling special effects, Prince of Persia creates some genuinely dazzling head trips when the dagger is clicked. It’s no small thing, when the sands of time roll backwards, and it’s a genuine visual treat every time we get to see that energy unleashed. (More at Techland: The top 10 games of the year)
But when it speeds up, throwing our young, untested prince into battle as he lays siege to a castle, or into a hand-to-hand scuffle with knife-throwers and ancient uber-warriors, or into that cave where Ben Kingsley wants to achieve world domination, Persia just about gives you whiplash. This isn’t a film that wastes a second, and there’s something about this adrenaline rush that is unabashedly gratuitous. Newell’s got a lot of goodies to throw at you, and he’s not going to bide his time before unleashing the fun.
Honestly, this is the way I like my swashbucklers. I think back to Raiders of the Lost Ark, with its hilarious asides, clashing personalities, supernatural undertones and boiling politics, and I recall feeling the same head-rush with Spielberg’s mania. With Prince of Persia, the politics are those of Iraq, with bad intelligence precipitating an unlawful invasion and a raging insurgence. Hey, that’s how much fun Prince of Persia is: It stands tall as one of the most searing indictments I’ve ever seen of the Iraq War, and yet it never feels tedious or condescending.
There are action films that work as special effects marathons and those that work as character studies, but there’s certainly a place in my catalogue for whiplash wonders like Prince of Persia, which punch the pedal and never give you a second to acclimate to the acceleration. Video game or not, this is a high-voltage first-person-shooter entertainment.
Grade: B+
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