Rinse of Persia

I need a shower. That was my immediate thought after seeing the new motion picture brought to us from the producer of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Will they just shut the fuck up about that? What about any of the good films he has been involved with? Why do they have to remind us that he produced the pirates of the bloody Caribbean?

My main gripe of the pirate films is that they essentially avoid all things piratey. Yes, Captain Jack Sparrow is a pirate, yes, there are other pirates in it too, but why did we have to spend so much time listening to terrible wooden dialogue from the non pirates? I wanted more pirates, something akin to Monkey Island. To me, it seemed like they were relying on Johnny Depp’s mildly amusing movements so they didn’t have to write a good script. Sadly this is a formula that works, and as Johnny Depp donned his magical tomfoolery shoes on in Alice in Wonderland, it makes the film studios very rich indeed. £10.50 to see that crock of shit, I’m still not over it.

So here comes Disney’s next project, Prince of Persia. As video game adaptations are generally god awful, they opted to market this as a Pirates of the Caribbean kind of film. Yay for me. Like pirates, you have a posh twat orphan child - Jake Gyllenhall, who is only slightly less annoying than Orlando Bloom - who is whisked on an adventure that takes mild peril to a whole new extreme. Watching someone handle paper is more perilous, “I hope for his own safety he doesn’t get a paper cut!”. Throw in a posh girl as a love interest, and a well respected actor as the bad guy, interlope the terrible plot with massive stunts, and you have your very own blockbuster movie.

There shouldn’t be a formula for making movies like this, because not only is it repetitive, it makes for an awful film. Jake Gyllenhall isn’t Persian! Yes, Ben Kingsley isn’t Indian, but was great as Gandhi, but Jake Gyllenhall is one of the most American looking men in the world. An American audience would obviously prefer this. To them, a Persian protagonist would look like a terrorist, and rooting for a terrorist would be unpatriotic, so we’re stuck with Prince fuck face Dustin. I would have preferred it if Kingsley reprised his role of Don Logan, that would have made for a more tense confrontation.

All in all we are made to go through the same motions we did with pirates only with much more sand and far fewer pirates, and we are gifted at the end with the notion that the prince can just go back in time so the last 2 hours never happened, which to me is pissing on a wound, because I can’t do that. To make matters worse, I spilt Pepsi Max all over me during the trailers, and somehow I now consider it to be the best video game adaptation ever made.