Not bad, but not special

Rating: 8/10 (26 May 2010)

You can see what they were after - that Pirates Of The Caribbean vibe. Unfortunately, they didn't get a script that sparkled, nor did they get anything like Johnny Depp's out of left field performance.
Instead they got a workmanlike and likable hero in Jake Gyllenhaal's Prince Dastan, a feisty (is there any other sort?) and sometimes rather too shrill princess in Gemma Arterton, a selection of royal relatives led by Ben Kingsley who kept you wondering briefly whether they were friends or foes, a comedy sheik in Alfred Molina, a colour palette consisting of different shades of sand, some OK CGI, a story which kept going enough to hold your interest (with chunks borrowed from CS Lewis' Narnia book A Horse And His Boy), shedloads of action, and early sections comprising a definite tip of the hat to Disney's animated Aladdin.
There were also things you didn't get. You didn't get (as soon as you understood that the maguffin was a mechanism to enable you to go back in time) much dramatic tension - if you know that time can be wound backwards then you never really feel that your characters are in any real jeopardy: the time reversal needs to be hidden in order for there to be anything at stake, but here it was displayed in the title. You also didn't get a classic score - you got functional underscoring with middle eastern influences. And you didn't get much flesh - OK, so it was Disney, but Miss Arterton was a very heavily covered up princess. It would have been welcome if there had been navel sightings from time to time, or if a bit more bosom had heaved into view.
So I was entertained, but it didn't give me any more than I expected.