Waste of Time

Rating: 2/10 (31 May 2010)

"Prince of Persia: Sands of Time" ain't no "300." The ancient Greeks win again. In the opening scene, before you've had any chance to learn who anyone is or why you should care about anything that happens, the film's "heroes" commit a massacre and invasion of an innocent, spiritually advanced civilization. Hard to care about these characters.
Jake Gyllenhaal is sexy and appealing, almost Errol-Flynn-like. Ben Kingsley could not give a bad performance if he tried. Campy Alfred Molina has some laugh-out-loud funny lines as an anti-tax "entrepreneur" and ostrich race organizer. Steve Toussaint is impressive as a Sudanese knife-thrower. But that's it. Their best bits add up to about five minutes. Otherwise the movie is cluttered, meaningless, and boring.
"Prince of Persia" is orientalist in a way that feels unacceptable for 2010, even in a movie based on a video game. Every cliché of the Middle East is piled into the movie, junkyard style – whirling dervishes, sand dunes, camels, women for sale, the Hashshashin, Arabic – whether these items fit in sixth-century Persia or not. Do we really need to gratuitously toy with others' histories and cultures at a time when the current leader of Persia, or Iran, is talking about getting nukes to wipe Israel off the map?