The film often has an impressive look but it fades from memory like quicksand, possibly because there is nothing meaty in the storytelling for you to chew on. Oh, how the filmmakers try to rope a seemingly complex story out of all this nonsense. Jake Gyllenhaal, sporting a British accent, is the adventurer prince Dastan who is framed by somebody in the palace, by somebody likely also with a British accent.
Gyllenhaal (“Jarhead”), a born American, has been in a lot of terrific movies where he beautifully underplays his characters with a dash of humbleness. Now he is in leather-strapped warrior outfits spouting tough-gruel dialogue like he’s Orlando Bloom as Maximus. When he gets lovey-dovey eyes then that’s the Gyllenhaal we know, a lover not a fighter. A Town & Country boy, not a Persian Empire warrior. Anyway, it’s about time to ask this: Do audiences worldwide accept that British accents pretty much cover any foreign culture from any time in the past? Let’s hope not.
The outfits are intended to make Gyllenhaal, and everybody else, look beefy. And so our hero looks muscular, albeit, but not a genuine specimen of ancient times. The movie contains military strategies unbeknownst to history, featuring actors scaling walls in unprecedented and impossible ways. Yet, wink-wink humor aside, the acting is so square and serious, but let’s not forget inauthentic. I would have preferred the blockhead acting of Brendan Fraser of “The Mummy” movies, the it’s-so-stupidly-self-aware-it’s-priceless kind of acting.
As obligatory for the plot, Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton, “Quantam of Solace”) is dragged through the political upheaval, at one point enslaved, but in family movie terms. She has a love and hate relationship with Dastan, but at first it’s just hate, and then it’s bantering, and then the rest of the formula. Arterton is a confused actress who doesn’t have a clue on how to modulate the love-hate formula to endear the audience. Her screen personality is poison.
Ben Kingsley and Alfred Molina, cast for their pedigree, don’t add much class either despite their reputations – they parody themselves. What’s left is a CGI-heavy action film (even the snakes are CGI), with lots of rapid cutting to no positive effect. The awe is brief, though existent, in the swirling aerial shots that reveal an entire city. But the messy shooting and editing style is rampant, and director Mike Newell (“Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”) has no sense of crowd control.
The worst special effects are the core ones dealing with a magic dagger that turns back the sands of time. These effects are video game similes cranked to a slow-motion effect that only lets the eye wander endlessly upon the lousy CGI. The climactic inferno – who will fall into the abyss? – is at least an imaginative and tactile demonstration of effects except that it is also ridiculously overblown (doesn’t it look hot down there, like Fahrenheit 451 kind of hot?). Even for fantasy purposes nothing in “Prince of Persia” is remotely humanly plausible or made to feel “real.”
The public statement that Disney made recently reflected that the company will make no more traditional films at all, focusing entirely on animation, franchises and superheroes. With this insultingly bad cast, incoherently scripted and disjointedly directed formula product, Walt Disney spotlights its directive in company soullessness.
Go to the official site at http://adisney.go.com/disneypictures/princeofpersia/
Grade: D+
No comments:
Post a Comment