PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME

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Starring Jake Gyllenhaal

Trailer

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Ticktockticktockticktockticktock. Hollywood’s reaching a critical mass and the bullet train can’t be stopped, movies flying out the sides and cracking unsuspecting farm workers in the wallet with the all the force of a bad idea. Gyllenhaal’s second time-travel escapade sees all the ingenuity and heart that made Pirates of the Caribbean become formula; English actors painted brown, offbeat Yank hearthrobber pulling an accent for the lead, throw in a guy from Coupling and set it in ye olde computer-generated world: Bam! No. For all its plot holes the biggest absence here is the size of Saturn: there’s no Johnny Depp. It’s Pirates with Will and Elizabeth as the leads, and every bit as jump-out-of-a-harrier death wish inducing as that sounds. However, the problems go far deeper than a simple case of cut and paste money-running; a dearth of quality dialogue and direction seems to be the blockbuster’s leprosy at the moment, but big-time Hollywood crawls on with half a leg and three fingers left regardless. The script hasn’t been proofread in a tent-pole film since Star Trek, whilst pacing flies out the window in the face of computer programming gone bat-shit; stopping the running and jumping every fifteen minutes for a two-second sound bite window means there’s no time for characters, plot, tension or caring, a fundamental fuck-up in following anything that’s going on around you. There’s something horribly, soul-meltingly sad about watching decent actors trying to say nothing with charm and aplomb, even when you can still catch Ben Kingsley in the corner, the dollar signs rolling out of his black, empty sockets, furnishing his tomb. Look back at Spielberg, ring up George Lucas in ’77 and remember that people are capable of this. Prince of Persia stands not only as a gigantic dog-fucking failure, but a terrifying example of Hollywood’s increasing inability to remember the basics of telling a story, symbolized best by the ending; as Jake grimaces and scowls nobly in a literal sinkhole of CGI, you can see the humanity of the entire movie industry being sucked away into a big empty pool of money. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, it makes Iron Man 2 look like Citizen Kane. But the ticket does say POP: SANDS, which sounds like an anime flick from the future. Wait for that instead.