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The film belongs to the acrobatic prince played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who adopts a Jude Law accent just to avoid being the odd man out. And they're both off-white! (While both are British-born, Kingsley's father was East Indian and Molina is of Spanish-Italian heritage.) But these old dogs get only limited opportunities to cut loose. And as the trickster ally, Alfred Molina is just this side of heaven flashing a gold tooth while dispensing Tea Party rhetoric and conspiracy theories.
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For my money, Ben Kingsley's villain - bald and glowering in heavy eyeliner and sporting a pencil goatee - is a night's entertainment in itself. Or maybe the filmmakers just thought the job was done once they cast Ben Kingsley and Alfred Molina.įair enough. What might the mullahs make of this film's greatest visual flourish, a screen-filling shot of "Persian" beauty Gemma Arterton's swelling, airbrush-bronzed, sand-flecked cleavage cradling a jewel?
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Maybe the filmmakers were afraid that casting Iranians would inflame zealots just itching for another Theo van Gogh to stab. If you want a sense of how "Prince of Persia" might have transcended its costume ball packaging, consider how Mel Gibson cast Mexicans and indigenous North Americans for " Apocalypto," or how Zacharias Kunuk enlisted Inuit actors for "Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)." They appreciated the gravity that faces other than the usual European stock company can lend a film that aspires to transport young minds. "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" has been designed and costumed with palpable admiration for Persian architecture and culture, but the King Arthur casting makes it all seem backhanded. Forty-seven years after 20th Century Fox's porcelain "Cleopatra," superproducer Jerry Bruckheimer rockets the tradition of English-accented actors as the shorthand for nobility and heroism into an absurd new dimension. But the unbearable whiteness of this film isn't especially surprising or offensive, just depressingly lazy and unimaginative. All the major players in this adventure epic are white and sport British accents. The only people in "Prince of Persia" who might actually be mistaken for Persian appear about halfway in, astride galloping ostriches.