Been Watching: Princess of Persia

 Just for a change I'm going to copy the DVD blurb verbatim. You'll see why in a moment.

"The epic true story of  one woman's battle to save a nation."

 "King Xerxes is leading the Persians in a brutal war with the Greeks. At his side is the beautiful Esther, a woman transformed from peasant to princess.

 As the battle intensifies, an unlikely chain of events forces Esther into an impossible position - to choose between all she has ever dreamed of and the fate of her people.

 Can she defy an empire and save a nation on the brink of destruction?"

  Either the people who came up with the packaging have never sat down and watched this movie, or  what we have here is the most misleading DVD cover since some idiot described "Boat Trip" as a "hilarious comedy"

 Going by the cover, you'd expect this film to be an action flick. The heroine is swinging a sabre and that's obviously a battle going on in the background, right? 

 Nope.

 The closest you get to swordplay is a five minute training sequence and at no point does Esther get her hands on anything more lethal than a quill.

 Here's what the original DVD cover looked like. 

  

  No swords, no battle and I can't help noticing that the film is called something else entirely.

 Somebody is pulling a fast one here. 

  A little research reveals that this was filmed in 2003, released in 2006 and reissued on DVD under a new name, hoping to cash in on the "Prince of Persia" movie.  Sneaky gits. 

   The film I found myself watching is a biblical drama based around the story of Esther and it goes like this:  When the current Queen of Persia is manipulated into pissing off the king , her services are dispensed with and  Xerxes holds a contest  for a replacement. A young woman named Esther is  pressganged into the palace babe corps, quickly realising there are worse jobs . Being intelligent and educated she  manages to intrigue Xerxes enough to get the position of Queen. 

 Thing is, "Esther" is really Hadassah - a Jew who's hoping nobody will notice.

 The second part of the film is Esther dealing with palace intrigue, particularly the evil Haman and his plot to wipe every Jew off the face of the earth.

 And thanks to an unfortunate set of circumstances, Xerxes is not very happy with her right now.

  The first thing you notice is that this film looks great. The sets are magnificent, the costumes pretty  and wherever it is that they found to stand in for ancient Susa is glorious. 

 The dialogue is a bit hammy but it's a Biblical movie so that's sort of expected and most of the cast do the best they can. Omar Sharif adds the expected class to the proceedings, while Peter O'Toole pops up long enough to pad out his retirement fund. Tifany Dupont and Luke Goss aren't bad as Esther and Xerxes respectively and I suspect Goss's reluctant warrior-king is closer to the historical Xerxes than the enormous perv seen in "300"

 Bad guy Haman is a none-too-subtle Nazi to the extent that he has a frigging swastika as his badge and if you haven't worked out that the film-makers are a tad religious after the first 30 minutes then I have a proposition for you. You see there's this UN money sitting in a bank account in Nigeria and I need some help getting it into the UK...

  All things considered,  this film isn't bad and once I got over the initial surprise I rather enjoyed it.

Having said that, I think I'd rather have seen the film I thought I was getting. That looked like it might have been fun.