Prince Caspian

London during the Blitz. For a while it looks like the Pevensie children have wandered into a sequel to Atonement by mistake. Happily they take the tube to Narnia instead, even if they're dismayed to find their old castle at Cair Paravel in ruins. Nazi rockets aren't to blame, just the passage of time.

The four kings and queens have returned from the realms of myth to find their Edenic land overrun by the tyrannical Telmarines (a suspiciously Mediterranean, vaguely Popish lot led by Sergio Castellitto's King Miraz). These corrupt and hard-headed mortals have expelled all the talking animals, the dwarves and the centaurs and the minotaurs, and convinced themselves that trees never talked, Aslan never existed, the world was always as they have made it.

Miraz is not the rightful heir. That would be Caspian (smouldering 26-year-old Ben Barnes) - an enlightened and decidedly eligible prince who falls in with the forest people and rallies an army of the disenfranchised to confront the usurper. Lucy, Edmund, Peter and Susan will stand beside them.

It's not only Hollywood that succumbs to sequelitis. One of the weaker books in the Narnia series, Prince Caspian reads like an uninspired retread of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But the movie is a marked improvement on the novel, and an altogether more robust, confident enterprise than director Andrew Adamson's previous effort.

At its core are two lengthy battle sequences - the first is an invention of Adamson and his writing partners Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (You Kill Me); the second a significant elaboration on a mere two pages in the book.

Peter's bold pre-emptive assault on the Telmarine castle is the most exciting set piece in the picture, and would not look out of place beside Peter Jackson's work in The Lord of the Rings - the gold standard for this sort of thing, and the mark which Adamson has set for himself.

The assault founders on the competing pride and ego of the impetuous king and the eager prince - and the bloodshed might have been avoided altogether if the boys had deigned to listen to faithful little Lucy (Georgie Henley), the youngest and purest of Aslan's disciples. In this mythology, the shorter you are the nobler you're likely to prove.

The two most colorful scene-stealers are Reepicheep, a swashbuckling mouse (voiced with splendid gusto by Eddie Izzard), and Peter Dinklage's grumpy dwarf Trumpkin, patronisingly nicknamed 'Dear Little Friend' by the Pevensies or 'DLF', for short. Both bring a welcome dash of humour and irreverence to what is generally a darker, scarier installment.

Live action and digital effects are state of the art. There's a nice detail when a distracted centaur kid is pulled up to attention by his mom - although at one point during the climactic battle Caspian's strategy seems to involve bringing the roof down on the heads of his own cavalry. A few minutes later we're treated to the sorry spectacle of bullish minotaurs in retreat; the pathos all the greater because they're so obviously grown men in costume.

But these are minor distractions. The Chronicles of Narnia still feels a bit like Lord of the Rings in short trousers, but at least Prince Caspian is a step in the right direction. We even get a bonus cameo from Tilda Swinton's White Witch, the standout character in the first movie. Miraz isn't in her league, but there's less sermonizing here, and more than enough action to keep the series afloat for the Voyage of the Dawn Trader 24 months from now.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com