'The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian': A royal dud

Special effects can't hide the tepid story, ordinary direction and drama-starved battle scenes

By Roger Moore The Orlando Sentinel

Those nagging ”minor“ problems that burdened The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe take center stage in Prince Caspian, the second of seven Chronicles of Narnia installments to make it to the big screen.

The kid actors are bland. The direction is pedestrian. It's darker, literally, with an underlit opening and one of the two big set-piece battles taking place at night.

And the villains are dull and lacking in menace.

If you ever wondered what The Lord of the Rings would have been like had Disney made it on the cheap, tossing the cast of Hannah Montana into Middle-earth, here it is.

Not that Disney shoulders the main blame for this muddled letdown. Walden Media has the deal with C.S. Lewis's heir (a producer on the film), and they picked the director, insisted on a somewhat literal take on the Lewis story, and didn't spend their milk money on actors.

Consider this: A digitally animated warrior mouse, voiced by the sassy, snappy comic Eddie Izzard, steals the picture. Peter Dinklage (Elf) is near center-stage as Trumpkin, a warrior dwarf. The two of them so outclass the rest of the cast that you wonder if they teach charisma inside the Actor's Studio.

It's a year later in World War II Britain, and the four Pevensie kids — Lucy, Edmund, Peter and Susan — are only now adjusting to being ”at home,“ where they wear school uniforms instead of armor and must contend with everyday annoyances instead of holding the fate of a fairy kingdom in their hands.

But these ”royals“ are summoned back to Narnia, where more than 1,300 years have passed. Narnians — talking animals, centaurs, fauns, dwarves and the like — are ”extinct“ (just in hiding). The Telmarines, a heartless race of Spanish-accented hoodlums, seized control long ago. But good Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes of Stardust) might make things right.

If only he can survive an assassination attempt by his treacherous uncle (Sergio Castellitto of Mostly Martha). If only he can blow that magical horn that his Merlin-like ”professor“ (Vincent Grass — no, I've never heard of him either) that will bring the four kid-rulers back to Narnia to set things right.

If only he can stop imitating Mandy Patinkin's Inigo Montoya accent from The Princess Bride.

The kids return to a land that hasn't seen its Father, Son and Holy Lion, Aslan, in more than a thousand years. But Lucy (Georgie Henley) starts having visions of him. Why can't the others?

”Maybe you're not ready,“ she says, biblically.

Maybe Aslan helps those who help themselves, the combative Peter (William Moseley) reasons. So he rounds up the troops and wages war against a Conquistador-equipped army of Telmarines, with centaurs, badgers and bears.

It's not shaping up as a great summer for children's entertainment. The equally eye candy-ish Speed Racer started amusingly and petered out. Caspian begins slowly and can't really be rescued by the never-ending battles that constitute its latter half.

The effects are sharper, the New Zealand fairyland locations almost as impressive. But where's the heart, the angst, the magic? Only one death — of an extra — has any resonance. The leading men don't hold the screen at all, and plucky archer Susan (Anna Popplewell) doesn't have enough to do to make us forget how much she looks (and acts) like Miley Cyrus.

Returning Narnia director Andrew Adamson, a New Zealand native whose Shrek won an Oscar, shows improvement in staging the film's fights. But nothing off the battlefield is visually arresting or the least bit magical, a function of paint-by-numbers camera placement and lighting. Compare his London subway station scene to the Harry Potter movies' railroad moments. And he, Disney and Narnia are stuck with a cast that feels like Harry Potter castoffs.

Life is always much easier for a movie critic who doesn't have to bash a beloved children's book adaptation, a Disney film (they take it personally), or a story that's an allegory for Christians. But Disney should wrench this seven-book franchise away from Walden. Disney should find someone whose qualifications to direct live action extend beyond having his own house in New Zealand.

Unless, of course, they want to prove Lewis' friend and rival, Rings creator J.R.R. Tolkien, right in his assessment of Narnia:

”This will never do.“