The bloating

Rating: 2/10 (20 July 2008)

I was really surprised at how seriously awful this movie is. The early scenes are fine enough, and Lucy's entry into Narnia is nice. But ultimately "Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe" seems to exist to transport audiences back to a time 30 years ago, when grotesque, over-produced, over-extended children's fare was the norm, because understanding children was a very low priority.
Where to begin...? If your story culminates in a protracted, climactic war, you've made a war movie; this isn't exactly a genre kids are screaming for. That, and it takes the form of a long, lifeless sermon... another format that doesn't make children stampede to theaters. Every single moment of the movie is unengaging. The script sucks and lazy, hierarchical thinking insures that every moment has been scrutinized for maximum staleness; everything is done the way someone did it before. The film-makers find a sluggish way to mount every scene, and continually find ways to bring the movie to a complete standstill with characters spouting yet another boring pronouncement. It moves at the pace of a funeral dirge, and after maybe half an hour it has all the excitement of a diagram. Specificity vanishes to make room for more setpieces. Both Liam Neeson and Tilda Swinton give performances that some committee of drones approved.
If your kid likes this, you've got yourselves a dud. Only pasty, anemic indoors-oriented Brit brats pining for a lordship could tolerate even twenty minutes of this. Sadly it's over two hours long. This movie is D.O.A..