Video games as art is an ongoing debate that, really, everyone is sick of having. The ability for video games to make the leap to other art forms is rarely questioned, however, since all the evidence builds to a fairly unimpeachable consensus: nope, video games do not work as anything else but video games, and especially not as films. To date there's yet to be a genuinely good video game film made, with the majority being medicore (Silent Hill) or actually crap (Super Mario Bros). Prince Of Persia falls somewhere between the two. On paper it really should've worked, with the plot being nothing more than a supernatural twist on old swords-and-sandals epics, noted director Mike Higgins behind the camera, and a cast that included Ben Kingsley, Gemma Arterton, and Jake Gyllenhaal in the title role. And yet. Again, you can't shoulder all of the blame on the star, but he certainly didn't help. Gyllenhaals as Datsan is a complete character vacuum, an absence of a performance, a total bore on which a whole film is meant to be hung on. Perhaps it's not a surprise it collapsed in on itself.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
