'Princess' drama fades into fairy-tale romance

One of the problems with romance movies these days is that it’s hard to find an obstacle that will keep the lovers apart.

Here’s one: Date and die.

That’s the dilemma set up in "The Princess and the Marine" (8 p.m. tomorrow, NBC), a fact-based "Romeo and Juliet" update about a girl from the Persian Gulf country of Bahrain and an American soldier who risk imprisonment and possible execution to be together.

The princess in question is Meriam Al-Khalifa (Marisol Nichols, who almost carries the movie by herself). The Marine is Jason Johnson (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), who is stationed at a Bahraini base where the rules are "no booze in public and keep it zipped."

The movie does a decent, if broad-stroked, job of bringing us into Meriam’s cloistered world. Change is occurring but it’s still a world of arranged marriages and strict separation of the sexes. Violating those rules, particularly with a non-Muslim, can have dire consequences.

Chafing at the restrictions, Meriam arranges a meeting with Jason and his friends at the mall. Soon, the 19-year-old princess and the 25-year-old Marine are in love and plotting a way to be together.

And that, sadly, is where the movie falls apart. Filmed outside Los Angeles, "Princess" never adequately creates the foreign land that this star-crossed couple need to occupy.

NBC would like us to see this as a fairy-tale romance, which would conveniently avoid real-world questions - like, say, whether it’s appropriate to air this movie so close to the couple’s fifth asylum hearing.

No one asks whether this sheltered teenager may have acted unwisely or in haste. Nor does NBC seem particularly concerned that there’s a chance the facts have been manipulated to aid in the couples’ immigration fight.

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