'Prince Caspian' may stray from original story, but battles are a winner

by John Serba | The Grand Rapids Press

Friday May 16, 2008, 9:36 AM

From left, Georgie Henley as Lucy, William Moseley as Peter, Ben Barnes as Prince Caspian, Anna Popplewell as Susan and Skandar Keynes as Edmund star in "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian."

Perhaps it's a dubious compliment to say "Prince Caspian's" best attributes are of the technical variety.

What many people have fallen in love with is author C.S. Lewis' story, something that gets somewhat short shrift in the second film of the "Chronicles of Narnia" franchise. It's telling that the most effective moment in "Caspian" is a daring midnight raid on a castle, a sequence that isn't in the book.

Since the series' opening salvo, 2005's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," director Andrew Adamson has become more skilled at assembling action sequences and creating suspense within them. Under cover of darkness, griffins drop soldiers onto guard towers, and swordsmice (yes, swordsmice) infiltrate the sleeping castle. We experience the thrilling chill of an attack plan's disparate bits assembling into something bold and powerful.

Elsewhere, Adamson relishes the grit of a one-on-one clash of skilled swordsmen and puts us smack in the gnarly, gnashing teeth of the film's climactic battle. The special effects are seamless, the array of magical creatures (minotaurs, fauns, centaurs, talking bears and badgers) effectively and whimsically rendered. It's easy to accept the world of Narnia as a truth and not just a computer-animated creation.

Such exhilaration is pure and as raw as a (barely) PG-rated Disney film gets -- so much so, we can forgive the director for amping the dramatics with overheated slo-mo corniness and propping up the quieter scenes with starchy dialogue.

We're introduced to Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) fending off an assassination attempt ordered by his cruel uncle, Miraz (Sergio Castellitto). Many hundreds of years have passed since the events of "Wardrobe," and Narnia is controlled by the Telmarines, a cruel race of humans who consider the extinction of dwarves, talking animals and the like a blessing.

Fleeing for his life, Caspian blows an ancient horn, summoning the Pevensie children back to Narnia to aid him in ousting Miraz. So Peter (William Moseley), Edmund (Skandar Keynes), Susan (Anna Popplewell) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) step off a drab London subway platform and back into a land they barely recognize as the benevolent place they liberated from the White Witch.

The Pevensies, troubled by the oppression of the friendly Narnian races, are motivated by goodness. The same goes for Caspian, although he harbors simmering resentment after he learns Miraz murdered his father.

The actors here exist in a charisma-free zone: Barnes fuels his performance with generic, pretty boy angst; Moseley struggles to lend conviction to his role as a skilled warrior-king, and Popplewell, despite her striking crystal-blue eyes, exhibits limited range as Susan, who occasionally gets gooey in Caspian's hunktastic presence.

Peter Dinklage plays Trumpkin in "Prince Caspian."

Outside of memorable turns by Peter Dinklage, wearing a billy-goats-gruff beard as the grumpy dwarf Trumpkin, and Eddie Izzard, voicing the charming, rapier-wielding rodent Reepicheep, Henley provides the strongest performance. Lucy has visions of the noble lion Aslan (voice of Liam Neeson), maintaining her faith in his return from a never-coherently explained exile while the others harbor skepticism.

Within Lucy's beliefs, one can interpret the Christian allegory many C.S. Lewis devotees often trumpet. Aslan's inevitable return finds him summoning the powers of the natural world to face off against the Telmarines' hubris and arrogance -- and it contributes to the spectacle with more awe-inspiring crash-bang-boom.

Certainly, there's validity in entertainment value, its nearly 2 1/2-hour run time passing quickly and efficiently.

Whether "Prince Caspian" stays true to the spirit of Lewis' source material is debatable, and purists may take offense when faced with this interpretation's grandiose spectacle, for which the film is most memorable, and why it's marginally better than its predecessor.

E-mail John Serba: jserba@grpress.com