Sadly, it spent too much time being run-of-the-mill.

Rating: 6/10 (14 June 2010)

I tend to feel Prince of Persia the movie owed me a watchable story, after paying 140 Baht(more than average in Thai cinemas) and two unremarkable hours in the digital cinema. I also tend to doubt the possibility this movie will ever speak to you with any messages, should them be fairy tale messages or serious politic messages. That being said, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is quite a disappointment from a bunch of names I admired.
The Parkour sequences were fun to watch, so was the siege sequence, but if you have watched the trailer, you've seen them all. It's never really captivating. You got eye candies, just like you've got Dastan and Princess Tamina, but you've also got terrible performances and disturbing character background illustration. That part that talked about Tamina's coronation as the Sand prophet was so hilariously bad that I almost laughed out. What was more hilarious was her character's development after the flashback, that Tamina transformed magically from a cursing,sarcastic-talking person into a religiously holified person......
I guess the movie's intrinsically bad because of the script, that they tried to please all the demographic groups so they had to forgo all the valid, culture-identifying messages. The CGI landscapes of ancient Persia spent many millions, yet never succeeded in giving you anything material. The story had Dastan started in the slum, and granted him a heart of gold that cemented sibling love as the only thing that's closest to a "soul" in this hollow story. Unfortunately, the most emotional role who also provided the best fighting sequence is not our prince, but some "knife thrower".
I gave the movie 6/10 out of the respect for Ben Kinsley having very dark eyeliner, and the final act that somehow managed to save this movie. What I like to talk more about is the potential it wasted in this great context. With human dreams to go back in time to fix mistakes, sands as the symbol of infinite bleakness/lifelessness, exotic locations with exotic tales, POP the movie could have told you a story, favorably in a fable style, just like the original games. Yet it misused the knife of time, made the prince an underachiever in almost every remarkable aspects in the original game, and tell you craps like "some souls are bound beyond time". Time-traveling in a fantasy context was great, at least in Groundhog Day, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and the Sands of Time games.For the record, The Two Thrones gave you great opportunities to recognize and reflex on your own dark sides, and suggested you to choose the way of repent rather than the way of chasing shadows. Are mainstream audiences really so secular that they can't even stand fables with a bit biblical touch? Or are they only being awed enough to respect some environmentalism because Avatar had awesome visuals? I doubt it, and I strongly believe someone can make a much-better POP movie that is really epic.