Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (**3/4)

One of the very few computer action games I got into was Prince of Persia, which involved a lot of running and jumping in a palace, with nice graphics by early 1990s standards. Coincidentally, this movie has the same name as that video game. Oh sure, the credits claim that the one is actually based on the other, and the game’s creator, Jordan Mechner even gets a story credit. But it’s not really any more based on it than Pretty in Pink was based on the Psychedelic Furs song. More like if the Disney people went to the guys who wrote the remake of The Uninvited and one of the guys who wrote Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights and said, can you write us a generic action thriller with a romantic angle called Prince of Persia? And it was done.

Of course, it’s very professionally done. The director is Mike Newell, who made maybe the best of the Harry Potter movies, Goblet of Fire. And the cast, led by an impressively beefed-up Jake Gyllenhaal, features Oscar winner Ben Kingsley (as the prince’s influential uncle). Gyllenhaal is the title character, a common boy adopted by the king and fated to lead the preemptive invasion of a holy city thought, though not proven, to have extremely powerful weapons. I have no idea whose idea it was to make the film an Iraq war allegory, but there it is, although most twelve-year-old boys will fail to notice.

The main plotline is the usual fantasy-film nonsense about a magic object that, if captured, will unleash a mighty wave of CGI effects the likes of which have not been seen since the last big-budget fantasy film. This is really too bad. The video game doesn’t supply much of a plot for the movie, but it does suggest a film in which running and jumping in a palace would play more of a role. There’s a little, but the occasional parkour sequences don’t top the ones in District B13 or Casino Royale.

As for the characters, they’re pretty standard. The ancient city is led by a plucky princess (Gemma Arterton). Ever since Star Wars, I guess, the plucky princess is a requisite character for this sort of movie. In the course of five minutes of screen time, she saves the prince, then tries to kill him. She is adversary and love interest, damsel in distress and woman of action, whatever. Meanwhile, the tone of the movie shifts from straight action to Romancing the Stone-style comedic adventure, as if different scenes had been assigned to different writers. (And indeed, several are credited.)

The result isn’t incoherent, but is disjointed. On the bright side are minor time-travel tricks, an impressive re-creation of some real sites in ancient Persia, and medium-good swordfighting. Not good enough to recommend though.


IMDB link

reviewed 5/27/10

Silent Hill (**1/2)

For those who liked The Ring and The Grudge but felt their back stories weren’t weird enough, this video-game adaptation offers religious fanaticism, underground mine fires, killer cockroaches, and so much more.

Most American horror films seem to come in two flavors. The more common type is where a bunch of stupid young people get together and get picked off by a crazy person. This, based on a series of Sony Playstation games, is the other kind, where some horrible event in the past haunts the present. (Some movies, like the lousy Stay Alive, combine these two scenarios). Besides fans of the games, Silent Hill may appeal to people who liked The Grudge and The Ring, both Japanese imports that centered around the death of a child. The Silent Hill game was also a Japanese creation. The movie, though, isn’t a remake; it utilizes some of the scenarios of the games but introduces a different lead character, played by Radha Mitchell (Melinda and Melinda). My feeling is that screenwriters like to use women central characters in horror movies when they want the character to be able to show fear; male leads are expected to stoically kick ass.

The Silent Hill in this movie is in West Virginia, but screenwriter Roger Avary was also inspired by the abandoned town of Centralia, PA, where a decades-old coal fire continues to burn underground. Avary’s scenario is that Mitchell’s character has an adopted daughter whose night terrors suggest a connection to the eerie ghost town. When there, she finds herself moving back and forth in time, experiencing the nightmare that overtook the town in the 1970s. This back story kind of explains what’s going on, but only to a point. The plot represents a kitchen sink of creepiness, from giant cockroaches to mysterious women spouting archaic language to old-fashioned witch-burnings. I can’t say this is my favorite kind of movie. My eyes start to glaze over when characters start chanting about demons and curses and so on. If you need to understand, for example, what caused there to be deadly bugs, you’ll probably have to listen to the DVD commentary track or something. (The short version is, the bugs are in the game.) However, it’s clear enough that the movie was not a cheap cash-in like, for example, House of the Dead. Director Christophe Gans’s previous movie was the successful French import Brotherhood of the Wolf, and here he fills the screen with a number of memorable and disturbing images, including the town itself. The ending is also intriguing (or confusing), so if this sounds like your kind of movie, you’ll probably like it. If not…

IMDb link

posted 8/23/13

Doom (***)

This wasn’t a movie I expected to like. There have been a couple of decent video game-to-film adaptations, like Final Fantasy, but Doom was better known for its trend-setting violence than memorable characters or scenario. What this movie has to do with the game is best debated by people who’ve played it, but even if the title is mostly a marketing gimmick, it’s a gimmick for a movie that actually turns out to have a reasonable story. (The body count isn’t even that high, perhaps disappointing some of the target audience.) The movie (and its promotion) makes a big deal about its “BFG,” where the B and G stand for “big” and “gun,” but the gunplay is not particularly impressive or emphasized. The Rock plays the leader of a platoon sent to Mars to help figure out and/or contain a genetic experiment gone wrong. Much of the action is set in an underground bunker whose salient feature is visible piping. (Rosamund Pike of Die Another Day plays the lead scientist there.) While it’s true that all genetic experiments in sci-fi movies must go wrong, the unoriginal premise leads to actual suspense and occasional surprise

IMDb link

circulated via email 10/27/05 and posted 10/18/13