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Save for Michael Bay, who parted company with Mr. Newell surely knew what he was getting himself into when he signed on with the producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Considering that he made the move from the art house to the blockbuster a few years ago with “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” Mr. 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. But given the strained relations between the United States and Iran, it’s a representation worth noting, particularly since Dastan’s worth is finally measured by his more peaceable actions.
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Granted, the resurrection of a sexpot Middle Eastern hero (even one played by a non-Persian actor) might not seem like progress. Gyllenhaal instead follows and runs and leaps in the robustly muscular and acrobatic tradition of Douglas Fairbanks, the silent-film star whose Middle Eastern exploits were aggressively masculine. More butch than the silent-screen god Valentino (best known for playing the Sheik, an Arab rather than a Persian heartbreaker), Mr. Gyllenhaal offers an updated spin on the mysterious Oriental lover of cinematic yesteryear. The father imparts wise words, and the brothers clasp hands and lock gazes, but the fraternal bonds are shredded after they invade a holy city and Dastan is ensnared in a palace intrigue.Ĭut and chiseled, his pumped-up pectorals flashing, Mr. The film, directed by Mike Newell and written by Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard, pays dutiful if cursory attention to the family angle. Gyllenhaal), the adopted son of King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup), who plucked the wee boy out of the streets to raise the child alongside his royal spawn, Tus (Richard Coyle) and Garsiv (Toby Kebbell). Set in the sixth century, the story involves Dastan (Mr. Based on a gulf-war-era video game, “Prince of Persia” stars Jake Gyllenhaal as the titular warrior who, scrambling up walls and vaulting across roofs amid camels, pomegranates and whirling dervishes, helps lead the search in wartime for, Praise Bruckheimer, weapons of not-quite-mass destruction.Īs an example of the new pop-cultural crusades “Prince of Persia” is at once generically insulting and relatively innocuous. First the United States invaded the Middle East, and now Hollywood has swooped in to finish the job: one day after the “Sex and the City” ladies landed in the Abu Dhabi doo-doo, setting off a dust storm of critical hate, “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” seems primed to raise huffy hackles with a swords-and-sandals-style spectacular in ancient Iran.