Speaking of overfamiliar, talented British dramatic helmer Mike Newell (Four Weddings & a Funeral, Donnie Brasco) pays the bills with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, an endlessly generic action adaptation of the acclaimed video game series. Jake Gyllenhaal tries to establish his badass action credentials but merely comes off as a little boy playing dress-up, and our previous knowledge of him make his faux-manly grunts even more laugh-inducing. The action is sleep-inducing and perfunctory, the story is as needlessly complicated as it is blandly generic, the little time-reversal quirk (they have a dagger that, with this special sand, can reverse time a minute or two back) is basically just used as a cheap deus ex machina whenever they need a quick emotional jolt, and the whodunit is so obvious that I’m not even sure it was supposed to be a mystery. It levels out to merely mediocre levels, and it’s vastly superior to Robin Hood if only by virtue of being between forty minutes and eight years shorter, but there’s not a lot here that one would want to spend much time on.
[Grade: 5/10 (C) / #46 (of 59) of 2010]
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