Movie Reviews: "Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time"

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time


Films based on the video games have mostly had a dreadful track record at the box office and an even worse one with critics. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time appears to be no exception.

Some critics observe that there appear to be as many digital effects in the film as in the game.




One of them is Roger Ebert, who writes in his review in the Chicago Sun-Times: “The irritating thing about special effects is that anything can happen, and often you can’t tell what the hell it is.”



Comments Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal: “What looks distinctive and believable in short takes and small doses can turn blatantly phony and deadly familiar when the scale is pumped up. Prince of Persia pumps itself up to the bursting point, and bursts.”



And Manohla Dargis writes in the New York Times: “The movie’s video game roots are most evident in the mechanized feel of many of the whiplash camera movements, which sharply zig and zag as if created by algorithms.”






Others, however, note that effects in such a movie are to be expected and note, as Lisa Kennedy does in the Denver Post that they “don’t bury the story.”



And several critics have high praise for Jake Gyllenhaal — his acting and his newly ripped body.

Says Peter Howell in the Toronto Star: “It’s not easy making something so fake seem almost real, but Gyllenhaal nails the insincerity, finally morphing from indie wimp into blockbuster action figure.”



Several critics are of two minds about the movie, including Ty Burr, who writes in the Boston Globe that the movie “is truly silly, formulaic stuff, without an original thought in its over-produced head. … So why did I enjoy myself as much as I did? In part by laughing at the movie — sometimes you take what you can get — but also because pulp this unembarrassed can have a verve, even an innocence, that’s unusual these days. It’s the rare junk that knows its name.”

-IMDB News