Prince of Persia | Brooklyn's Finest | Precious

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Rating:

Directed by Mike Newell. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton, Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina, Steve Toussaint, Toby Kebbell, Richard Coyle, Ronald Pickup, Reece Ritchie, Gísli Örn Garðarsson, Claudio Pacifico, Thomas DuPont, Dave Pope, Domonkos Pardanyi, Massimilano Ubaldi, Vladimir ‘Furdo’ Furdik, Christopher Greet, William Foster, Elliot James Neale, Selva Rasalingam, Daud Shah. Written by Boaz Yakin and Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard, from the video game series by Jordan Mechner.

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But not in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, because director Mike Newell has little idea of how to shoot an effective action sequence: they´re distractingly over-edited, have no rhythm, composed of too many close-ups and medium shots: we have almost no sense of where the characters are in relation to their surroundings or each other or what, exactly, is going on. This drains the action scenes of any suspense (let alone comprehension), and since they occur so frequently, the midsection of the film becomes a real slog to sit through.

Quick side-note: I recently saw Green Zone, from director Paul Greengrass, who popularized the shaky-cam, hyper-editing style in his Bourne films. The action scenes in Green Zone work because, back to the basic tenets of editing, the damn shots match: when he cuts, the movement of the camera from the previous cut transitions into the next one, and the screen composition matches as closely as possible too. And the shots are wide enough to give us perspective. This helps us adjust as smoothly as possible. It can be done.

Hawke is quite good – in full, world-is-collapsing Before the Devil Knows You´re Dead mode – but his character´s moral dilemma just didn´t fly with me. In the opening scene, we see him kill a man in cold blood, for, I assume, a lunchbag full of cash. What´s with any dilemma after that? But Hawke can play a twitchy basket case with the best of ‘em, and while a cop buddy tries to convince Sal that hey, you should be happy with all those kids and a loving wife, we never doubt the direction Sal is going to end up in.

And in the most interesting storyline, Richard Gere plays Eddie, a good cop who has seven days to go before retirement. And no, the obvious does not occur here. Instead, Gere plays a guy who has done everything by the book for an entire career, and is now questioning whether the book is right. He takes a do-gooder rookie out on patrol, who questions Eddie´s bravado when he plays it straight rather than doing the right thing. The next time Eddie sees that rookie is in an obituary, but the point has been made.

This, I am sure of: Gabourey Sidibe is a revelation as Claireece Precious Jones, the girl whom life hasn´t exactly been kind to. She´s an impenetrable mountain of a young woman, built for survival; her appearance and dialogue at a sharp disconnect with her true nature, represented in her narration. It would have been easy to play off scenes like the one where she steals a bucket of fried chicken for quick comedy, but Sidibe´s performance never lets us forget what her character has had to endure, every minute she´s on the screen.