Review – Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

I think I’m turning into a history nerd. This movie started off on my bad side by leading with a map of the Achaemenid Persian empire, but it swiftly became clear that the movie’s reality (to the extent it had one at all) was in fact several hundred years later. Of course picking at historical details in a brain-dead effects fest makes no more sense than reading the nutritional information on the back of a candy bar. The title character (Jake Gyllenhaal) discovers that the title substance allows him to back up a few seconds in the time continuum, something that occasionally comes in handy during a fight, though it gets used up too quickly to be a serious tactical advantage. In other words, conceptually this might work okay as a video game, but as a movie it’s a little like watching someone else play a video game. Mildly amusing