Prince of Persia Movie: It Doesn’t Suck

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 12, 2010

Color me surprised!

We ended up seeing The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time movie last night after the showing of The Karate Kid we intended to see was sold out.

And – surprisingly – I enjoyed it. Really. No, it’s not going to be one of my favorites (though the acrobatic action was a lot of fun), and it was tough to figure out what was going on with the Hassansins most of the time. But for the most part, it was pretty fun and enjoyable.

A videogame-based movie that didn’t suck! Imagine that!

Filed Under: Movies - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Justin Alexander said,

I thought it was a fairly enjoyable popcorn action flick.

Where I felt the film went wrong were the sands of time themselves:

(1) The dagger was essentially never used. As a film you’ve got exactly one gimmick. It would have behooved the writers to actually use that gimmick to some meaningful effect.

(2) The one time the dagger was used to any purpose beyond demonstrating that it does, in fact, work was the battle with the snakes. Only it made no sense: After rewinding, the Prince went back to the moment when he first asked for the dagger… which meant that he never needed the dagger in the first place.

(I think the way the scene was supposed to work was that he would go back to the moment the fight started and therefore know where all the snakes came from. But that didn’t actually happen.)

(3) Apparently using the dagger the way that they did at the end of the film would trigger an apocalypse… But that’s pretty much entirely irrelevant, since triggering the apocalypse immediately sends you back in time to a point before the apocalypse ever happens.

I also felt the end was a bit of a cop-out, opting as it did for the easy Hollywood Romance ending instead of the Casablanca-like missed opportunity found at the end of the original game. But that’s a quibble.
Rampant Coyote said,

Yeah, I made a couple of jokes last night about how he has this awesome magical dagger with great combat abilities that only actually comes into play *once* in a real fight.
Gareth Fouche said,

Yeah, it was very disney, but I was surprised at how it wasn’t horrible!

Nowhere near as awesome as the game’s plot, but about the best videogame-movie adaption I’ve seen.
erratio said,

Gah, my roleplaying group and I seem to be the only people who didn’t like it. I think the problem is that we’d gotten the impression that it was actually going to be good, as opposed to another silly game->movie action flick.

Having said that, it was actually kind of cool the way he got his brother to believe him by stabbing himself. I was expecting something much cornier, like using it to predict what the brother would say or something like that.
Xenovore said,

Yup, could’ve been better, but I enjoyed it. Shows what can happen when Uwe Boll is kept far, far away from the IP.
Jon Ho said,

I find the movie quite fun! It was like watching the mummy; there are some light moments, the tone of the movie is not brooding, although the whole thing might sound campy.
Rampant Coyote said,

You know, I found it very easy to make that comparison too. I loved The Mummy – in all it’s campy glory.