With the possible exception of Cronenberg’s The Brood, I’ve never seen a film so filled with children murdering people as The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. This sequel to 2005’s SNL-Digital Short-immortalized The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe features a body count comparable to Total Recall.

Most of the casualties are the swarthy, crossbow-wielding henchmen of a royal usurper (Sergio Castellito) with designs on Narnia’s throne; most of the killing is done by the Pevensie children, who have been re-summoned from 1940s London to fantasy land by the titular prince Capsian (Brit Ben Barnes, trying on a terrible faux-Sicilian accent) – the realm’s rightful ruler.  The Pevensies enlist various enchanted woodland denizens in the fight, but things go poorly until the inevitable appearance of Aslan, the furry, well-maned Christ manqué given sanctimonious voice by Liam Neeson.

The Christian underpinnings of Lewis’ source material are as blatant as ever, but the film is a failure of imagination rather than ideology. Once again, series director Andrew Adamson mistakes pandering signifiers of wonderment (swelling music, swirling camera movements, gape-mouthed actors) for the thing itself — and once again, he cribs the digital sweep ebb of the ensemble battle sequences from The Lord of the Rings.

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