Amazing locale with good characters and a good story

Rating: 6/10 (2 June 2010)

I remember that when I first watched "Pirates of the Caribbean" series, what really impressed me with that movie was the amazing sets and locales when they filmed it.
That feeling is repeated in this movie. The sets and the locations are simply amazing in this movie. If you're gonna praise somebody, big props to the set designers and production team. Just like in POTC they managed to take me to a far off rich fantasy world.
If you've played the games, you'll know that the stories are usually straight-forward (In some cases like the Dreamcast version there was no story at all!) and the focus of the games was all about action and running around in a big world full of things that just about anybody can grab/climb/swing/shimmy/jump off of.
So my first thought when I heard about this movie was "How the heck are they gonna come up with a decent story for the script based of the source material?" Wonder of wonders, the writers managed to come up with something pretty engaging...if not totally predictable. Anything with time travel, you know what the hero's gonna do at the end. Time travel solves everything.
But I'm getting ahead. The main story deals with the Prince, fallen from grace after being framed for murdering the King, running around all over the middle east to find proof of his innocence. And on his way there's lot's of running, sword-fighting, more running, sneaking around, free-running, and a really hard-to-believe-but-you-still-go-with-it-anyway romantic subplot that appears out of nowhere (It's Disney so you probably saw that coming)
And while this is from the producers of POTC, don't expect any over the top character acting like with Jhonny Depp/Jack Sparrow. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a pretty good Prince, though not exactly matching the character from the games. Jake's prince is a lot nicer, which does take away a bit of the Prince's bad-ass aura. Gemma Arterton plays the spoiled princess Tamina rather convincingly. Ben Kingsley's evil uncle Nizam is a note from James Bond book of Villainy but still somehow works for the movie.
Some characters I can live without, like Dastan's other brother, Garsiv. I don't know where the film-makers got him from but I felt that this guy was rather inconsistent. It's not the actor's fault though, Toby Kebbell did as good a job as he could do. The character is just badly written in the script and the movie would've been fine without him.
Overall, an enjoyable movie that must be seen in the theaters. Fans of the game may find a few things missing from the overall experience but in my opinion the film-makers did a decent enough job. While the story and acting are above-average at best, those visuals were simply meant to be seen on the big screen.