Written by Vickie
May 28, 2010
As far as big-budget, high-concept summer popcorn flicks go, this action-fantasy-comedy is a bit of a disappointing start to the season.
Directed by Mike Newell and based on the popular video game, PoP stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Dastan, a peasant boy turned prince, who’s adopted by the King of Persia and raised as a member of the royal family. After his scheming uncle Nizam (Ben Kingsley) orchestrates an invasion of the peaceful city of Alamut under the guise of recovering a huge cache of weapons, and the King is subsequently murdered, Dastan is (somewhat inexplicably) named the prime suspect. His princely brothers (Richard Coyle and Toby Kebbell) put a price on his head, and Dastan flees... but not before reluctantly teaming with Alamut’s comely princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton), who’s got get eye on a fancy dagger Dastan picked up during the city’s takeover.
Long story short: the dagger controls time, and one click of the jewel in its handle can turn back time for a minute... or, under the right circumstances, unleash devastation unto the world. Not surprisingly, everybody wants to get their hands on the powerful device, so Dastan and Tamina set out to return it to the protection of the gods.
Awash in vast amounts of CGI and digital wizardry, the movie unfolds surprisingly slowly and uninterestingly. It was a good 45 minutes or so before the pace picked up and the story kicked in in earnest. But everything felt strangely flat and uninspired, as though everyone were working from some kind of tired blueprint and phoning in their work. I didn’t really care about any of the characters, or their struggles, or the dagger. The effects became distracting and occasionally overwhelming, rendering the action onscreen almost incoherent – several times, during several sequences, I lost track of where the characters were and who was fighting whom and what exactly was happening.
Gyllenhaal seems out of place in this swashbuckling context, and is never really convincing as a roguish action hero. Arterton is dulldulldull and the pair have no chemistry, and it felt like Newell’s direction to her was simply, “please stand there and look pretty.” It’s not until the glorious Alfred Molina turns up – as a hilariously corrupt sheik – that it becomes obvious how miscast the film’s two leads are. Molina is funny and spirited and smart, and he blows his co-stars off the screen whenever they’re together, much in the same way that Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow far outshone Orlando Bloom’s comparatively boring Will Turner in the similarly themed Pirates of the Caribbean flicks.
Ultimately, there’s a lot of running around and cheesy dialogue and parkour-ish leaping from point A to point B and an unsubtle narrative nod to the invasion of Iraq (magic daggers standing in for WMDs)... which may work fine in video-game form, but doesn’t really translate into a compelling motion picture.
