A street urchin named Dastan rescues a fellow rogue from a Persian bazaar, who was caught, it seems, stealing. As Dastan is apprehended himself, he catches the eye of the local king, who does the unthinkable – adopting the boy “for valor.”
Years later, we see Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) as a grown man, storming the walls of the sacred city of Alamut. In this wondrous city, he and his two prince brothers, along with their instigating uncle Nizam (Ben Kingsley), expect to find weapons that the Alamutians are secretly forging to sell to enemies of the Persian king. Upon closer inspection, the weapon story turns out to be a ruse. However, in the ensuing battle, Dastan manages to seize a dagger with magical properties. Capable of reversing time, it – as it later turns out – was the real reason for the invasion of Alamut. Before this is revealed, Dastan is framed for the king’s death, and he escapes the city with the local princess (Gemma Arterton), who follows him to the ends of the earth – initially not so much out of love, but because she is tasked with guarding the dagger. After all, in the wrong hands…
A New Summer Franchise?
“Prince of Persia” emerges as precisely what one might anticipate: a lighthearted, two-hour “roller coaster” that’s easy to watch and quickly forgotten. In some ways, the film could indeed aspire to be the new “Pirates of the Caribbean,” but it lacks the presence of Johnny Depp and, more importantly, the eccentricity that set “Pirates” apart from other summer blockbusters. In “Prince,” this deficiency is somewhat compensated for with ostriches and parkour, but as they say, where are the ostriches, and where is Jack Sparrow?
Otherwise, everything is in place, starting with director Mike Newell, who a few years ago couldn’t quite handle the overly ornate, Colombian material of Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera,” but has done an excellent job with the adaptation of a video game, which “Prince” essentially is. Much of this success is due to the fact that, at the suggestion of producer Jerry Bruckheimer, any ethnic logic was omitted from the start, making everything in the film a grand “artistic convention” that is hard to fault.
Casting Choices and Hollywood Conventions
Take, for example, Prince Dastan – played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a blue-eyed American with Jewish-Swedish roots and the manners of a cowboy who reads Kafka or even Schopenhauer at night. The words “Persia,” “Eastern,” are nowhere to be found in the description, and rightly so. But it doesn’t matter, because he is charming, not without talent, and, most importantly, runs well and doesn’t argue with producers when they tell him to run even better. After all, Ben Kingsley, flaunting oriental robes and triple eyeliner, even holds the title “Sir.” But whoever says that his “Nizam” is any worse for it, let them tell him that themselves.
The rest of the East is equally conditional in nature, and, more importantly, under the colorful decorations of 6th-century Persia, one can easily recognize the much more familiar ethnos called Hollywood. The black assassins are black, ugly, and invincible, like the Nazgûl from “The Lord of the Rings,” the bickering between Gemma and Jake inevitably evokes the screaming faces of Douglas and Turner, and during the archaeological puzzle scenes, it’s impossible to resist shouting “Indiana! Indiana!”. But that, in fact, is the main function of Bruckheimer’s production machine – to select the best and recast it into new stories that will delight new, often young, viewers.
As for Bruckheimer’s supposed rule that a scene should not last longer than four minutes – this is, apparently, so that older viewers don’t have time to think about why they are watching the same thing for the millionth time.