Film | Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

One of the more memorable games during the reign of the Apple II personal computer in 1989 was a game called Prince of Persia. It was a breakthrough game during its time, but I found it annoying because it's that kind of game where if you make one wrong move, you die--and it's game over.

That original game, now hailed as a classic, was remade into Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and after several sequels and two decades later, is now a film made by the same team who did Pirates of the Caribbean.

Now, it's a well-known fact that videogames turned into movies usually suck, and this one joins a long list of videogame movies that were huge disappointments. It looked good in the trailer though, with lots of CGI effects and combat scenes. But when you see it in the actual movie, it becomes tepid and tiresome.

What went wrong? For one thing, the two lead characters, the Prince and the Princess, lacked charisma--they were both as boring and bland as the sands that swirled in the desert around them. I'm also baffled why most of the characters spoke with British accents when they're supposed to be Middle Eastern.

The plot and storyline were loosely based on the videogames which I never finished, but the movie itself is so predictable that I correctly guessed the lame ending without even blinking. One other thing that I really hated in this movie was the godawful camerawork during the fight scenes; the camera moved around too much that it became difficult to tell which were the good guys and the bad guys.

Still, I have to give them credit--as terrible as most videogame films go, this one wasn't so bad; it appears to be the best of the lot, and it did rather well at the box office. An okay movie to pass the time, but I wouldn't bother for a repeat viewing.