Big, pretty fun. A music-free WIZARD OF OZ for the 21st Century

Rating: 8/10 (6 June 2010)

PRINCE OF PERSIA; forget the well publicized video-game inspiration (only in the afterglow does the final romantic resolution feel like the artificial balance of a successfully played "video-game" - it's also romantically right); I'd never heard of the video games and was far more aware of the semi-literate time travel, royal conspiracy and fairy tale sources those games were apparently cribbed from. While the final literal flashback just barely passes the credibility test under the "world rules" the film makers have set up, the plot basically works as a framework to hang the ample action and beautifully crafted fantasy on.
OK, I'm a sucker for Jake Gyllenhaal's smile (if you aren't, you probably shouldn't go - it's used a lot) but the film also has Sir Ben Kingsley and a uniformly talented supporting cast (Gyllenhaal's chemistry with leading lady Gemma Arterton is on a par with Tracy & Hepburn and based on the same kind of sparing), surprisingly decent production values and, as stated, a plot pretty well plagiarized from several relatively literate sources and recent front page searches for non-existent "weapons of mass destruction." If "G FORCE" - that ghastly gopher-spies-meet-evil-household-appliance-transformers kiddie film - was just what you'd expect from a Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer collaboration, this was probably as good as the unlikely ill-matched species mating could produce.
I'm a passionate believer in historical accuracy in theatrical story telling BASED on history (we LEARN much of our history from popular entertainment), but when your sources are as close to Andrew Lang's classic books of Fairy Tales as to Gibbon's or even McCullough's historical literature, the impossibility of placing this Persian "prince" or any details of his story in any actual chronology or even "real" historical legends can easily be excused.
PRINCE OF PERSIA is big, pretty and satisfying for at least as long afterward as it took to see it. It probably doesn't try to be more than fun, but it certainly succeeds at that. Is it worth the prices they're charging for movie-house films today? At least you see where the money went. I think I'll want to see it again - probably more than once - when the DVD comes out.