"He's a beaver, he shouldn't be saying anything!"

Rating: 6/10 (20 February 2006)

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
An Andrew Adamsson blockbuster
World War II is raging and the four Pevensie children are sent away from their mother to live in the mansion of the eccentric professor Kirke (entertaining, if wasted, Jim Broadbent). During a game of hide-and-seek, little Lucy (Georgie Henley) finds a wardrobe that leads to a different world. It's Narnia, a land which has been plagued by winter for hundreds of years, ruled with an iron fist by the evil witch queen Jadis (Tilda Swinton). The Pevensies must defeat the witch and take their places as kings and queens of Narnia.
I can't tell you how sick I am of movies with never-ending titles. If it isn't something as overlong as CON: TLTWTW, it's Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Fun With Dick and Jane, or The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl in 3-D. All I'm saying is, a movie title should have quality rather than quantity.
This is truly a film where acting almost comes last. An effects fest, NARNIA opens up with a mostly CGI sequence showing the German bombs falling over London. We are after that treated with talking CGI beavers, CGI wolves and foxes, CGI castles, entire CGI landscapes. WETA (previously worked on the Lord of the Rings trilogy) has also done a great make-up work, starting out with a nervous James McAvoy as a faun, all the way up to a huge battle between everything from cheetahs to minotaurs in the finale. Fans of fantasy shouldn't be disappointed: There are few mythical creatures that you won't find somewhere in NARNIA.
Moving on to the acting, however, this is where the film almost falls apart. For all the talking CGI animals, NARNIA simply does not contain a single believable performance from the leads. Voice acting aside, it often feels like all we see is a bunch of amateurs trying to act. William Moseley is simply laughable as Peter "the magnificent". He handles the "older brother" act fairly well for a newbie, but when he's suddenly put in full body armour and in charge of an army, it just doesn't work. Much more believable is Georgie Henley as the youngest sister. Anna Popplewell's interpretation of Susan is pretty ho-hum, while Skandar Keyes is far below average as Edmund. Much younger actors than him have created believable characters (read: Hayley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense) and the casting is just horrible.
Tilda Swinton's White Witch, supposedly the biggest main character in the movie (the CGI lion aside) is nothing special. She is definitely not awful, she just misses something to make her character memorable (although writing also should be blamed for this).
The biggest waste is probably Liam Neeson who shows up in the last 20 minutes to voice a computer generated lion, Aslan, the messiah of the film. Even he seems to have a hard time putting some emotion to his voice acting, and his voice seems out of place, plain and simple.
Andrew Adamson has had no problem delivering the goods with his half-raunchy, hilarious comedies Shrek and Shrek 2, so why doesn't it work in NARNIA? Well, it's quite simple: While the Shrek movies were satirical parodies, Adamson wants to make NARNIA the next big epic in the vein of the recent Lord of the Rings films, something he is just not capable of, especially considering that the novel was a cute and cozy children's story. The Narnia novels are amazing in their own genre, but Adamson has got it all wrong: they are just not supposed to be epic adventures.
The final battle feels like a cheat; since this is supposed to be a Disney movie, there can be no real violence or gore except for some faint flashes. The witch's death takes place off-screen, which is just lame. As mentioned before, William Moseley is completely out of place as the hero-of-the-day and only manages to look silly.
Overall, THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE is not a complete waste of time. There are some really good effects, but if you're looking for anything memorable, forget it. NARNIA is a run-of-the-mill blockbuster which is very disappointing considering Adamson's previous work and the amazing novel. Except for a small cameo by Rupert Everett, resurrected from Shrek 2, there's just not much fun here. 6 out of 10.