Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
A faithful adaptation of the actual story of the game, that’s what you get for adapting games with an actual plot, not Super Mario. The action is also very much inspired by Assassin’s Creed (the games, not the film).
Yes, the story is mostly a couple butting heads until love comes through, but then the twist is that she dies, and he needs to kill to world to bring her back. Weird how this is just transposed to transferred paternal love in The Last of Us.
As a bonus, you get a quippy Alfred Molina as a small time entrepreneur (a gangster) that hates taxes, Ben Kingsley milking the giant cow, and backflip-based stunts. That’s a lot of backflips.
The game is so respected, there are scenes of our hero running on walls. But the budget is much more enormous, so they ride around the Middle East in geographic wobbles. Alamut is in Syria, the Hindu Kush is around Afghanistan or Pakistan, their horses must have wings, and they don’t even cross over Baghdad (The Thief of Baghdad).
As is set in the desert, there are the obligatory Lawrence of Arabia quotes (they must be there, somewhere), and also a lot of quoting from LotR, with Hashashin as Nazgûl.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.