Jake’s a game boy

Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time
DIRECTED BY:
Mike ­Newell
STARRING: Jake ­Gyllenhaal, Gemma ­Arterton, Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina
CERT: 12A

FILM adaptations of video games are not famous for their outstanding quality, or their ability to remain in the memory much longer than the time it takes for you to reach the cinema exit.
Prince Of Persia doesn’t exactly mark the beginning of the revolution, though unlike some of its predecessors, it is at least a reasonably entertaining distraction, something you can bring the children to without fear that by the time the end credits roll, you will all be more stupid.
An impressively buffed-up Jake Gyllenhaal is the dashing hero, Prince Dastan, the adopted son of the King of Persia (Ronald Pickup). Dastan is a fine warrior with a fondness for dangerous acrobatic carry on and generally doing his own thing. Along with his royal step-brothers and their too-smooth-to-be-up-to-any-good uncle Nizam (Kingsley), Dastan storms the palace of Princess Tamina (Arterton) and finds a magical dagger which allows its owner to briefly turn back time.
Which is all fine and well until Dastan is framed for the king’s murder and finds himself teaming up with the beautiful princess on a grand and suitably epic quest to put manners on a few Persian pups and save the whole of civilisation from being destroyed by a really, really big sandstorm.
I have a soft spot for the bit of sword and sandals adventure and when it comes to the action and the spectacle, director Mike Newell (Four Weddings, Donnie Brasco) and producer Jerry Bruckheimer don’t disappoint.
Even the romance between Gyllenhall and Arterton has its moments and there’s some amusing dialogue between the two. Former Bond girl Arterton makes a fine and lively Princess and Gyllenhaal looks every bit the swashbuckling legend ­ though as the desert hero, he doesn’t quite have the kind of charisma that, say, Brendan Fraser did in The Mummy. It didn’t help that every time I heard his name, I thought of my uncle’s old 1980s Datsun.
In support, Kingsley does his usual effortless villain schtick and the standout performances come from Alfred Molina and Toby Kebbell, who turn up occasionally to provide some much-needed heart and comic relief.
All in all, it’s nothing particularly memorable or special, but younger viewers and female Gyllenhaal fans will get a kick and will no doubt join the queue when the sequel rolls around soon.

Cop Out 
DIRECTED BY:
Kevin Smith
STARRING: Bruce Willis, Tracy Morgan
CERT: 15A

Like most of what director Kevin Smith has done in his career, Cop Out is an excessively stupid and tasteless film.
But unlike some of Smith’s earlier movies, this one does not have the redeeming feature of being funny. It is the opposite of funny, everything that funny is not. It is anti-funny.
Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan are Jimmy and Paul, a pair of NYPD cops who get themselves suspended for a botched job on a major drugs case.
Which is a hassle they could have done without on top of their own troubles. Clueless blabbermouth Paul is becoming a paranoid wreck, convinced that his wife is messing around with their friendly and handsome neighbour and cranky veteran Jimmy’s daughter is wanting a big expensive wedding and though he hasn’t two pennies to rub together, he’ll be damned if she doesn’t have her big day and by God her wealthy new prat of a stepfather (Jason Lee) will not be the one paying for it. Or giving her away, for that matter.
Desperate, he decides to cash in his most beloved possession, a rare baseball card. But his luck is on a run of bad form and the card is stolen while he’s making the deal.
For the remainder of the film, the boys try to track down the card, hooking up along the way with a Mexican crime lord’s beautiful girlfriend (Ana de la Reguera) and having their heads wrecked by a nimble burglar (Seann William Scott) with more lives than a cat. (If somehow you haven’t left before the end credits, wait another minute.)
Smith fans will defend him by pointing to the fact that, unusually for him, he didn’t write the script; that crime was perpetrated by Rob and Mark Cullen. But Smith’s trademark infantile toilet humour is all over Tracy Morgan’s dialogue, so he clearly had a hand in the rewrites and which or whether, he still called all the shots without ever calling the most sensible one:
Lads, this is rubbish. Let’s all stop wasting our time.