Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Review

The dagger that reverses time is the one idea the source game built an entire grammar around, and this adaptation uses it perhaps five times, mostly to undo a stunt the audience has just watched. Mike Newell shoots the action in the cutting style of the period, close and choppy, which wastes both the parkour work and the money plainly visible in Wolf Kroeger's sets.

John Seale lights Morocco beautifully, so the film is at least pleasant to look at while very little happens. Jake Gyllenhaal is bulked up, cheerful and thoroughly miscast, doing a vaguely transatlantic accent as a Persian prince in a production that never seriously considered casting one. Gemma Arterton is handed the standard combative princess and no scenes from which to build her.

Ben Kingsley announces his treachery in his first shot and then waits two hours for the plot to catch up with him. Alfred Molina, running ostrich races and complaining about taxation, is the only person who appears to have read the script as a comedy, and he is the reason the middle hour stays watchable. The finale resets everything that happened, which is at least honest, since almost none of it mattered.