WANTED:PRINCE CASPIAN:SPACE CHIMPS

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA – PRINCE CASPIAN: Just so you understand my personal bias, I wasn’t much of a fan of the first Narnia installment, detailing the adventures of four British siblings who fall through a magical wardrobe into a kingdom full of talking animals, white queens and a lion Jesus voiced by Liam Neeson. Its heart seemed in the right place, but the resulting battles and lessons learned seemed so bland, the entire affair would have been more at home on the BBC. The sequel shifts the focus onto hunky Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) who seeks to regain his throne from a duplicitous uncle by inspiring all the displaced Narnians to rebel against the ruling authority. The end result is, you guessed it, more battles! Jaguars, pigs, centaurs, and rodents go toe to toe (or hoof to hoof, as the case may be) against an army of bad guys with a pretty impressive body count. Director Andrew Adamson may have a knack for producing computer generated beasties on a budget, but his fight sequences are bloody uninspired. His take on Prince Caspian is definitely darker in tone, but there’s no light at the end of the tunnel that makes the journey worthwhile. It’s quite literally just more of the same. Two new characters, a lively swordfighting mouse and grumpy dwarf (played by the wonderful Peter Dinklage), are the only flashes of color in a depressingly black and white affair. It’s tough to find fault with Disney’s Blu-ray presentation though. Like the previous Narnia entry, every detail is rendered razor-sharp and the “Circle-Vision Interactive” feature allows you to navigate the copious special features at your own pace. WANTED: Even if you hadn’t told me this Angelina Jolie actioner was based on a graphic novel, I’d like to think I could have guessed. Like many of the comic-to-screen translations these days, Wanted is swimming in the sort of faux-depth that only angry-young-men could find truly meaningful. James McAvoy follows the Luke Skywalker model – insignificant office worker plucked from his insignificant life to fulfill his destiny as a superpowered assassin – while Jolie submits to the most egregious eye candy role of her career. A crude, nihilistic, hormonal fantasy Wanted’s saving grace is the adrenaline-charged direction by Russian import Timur Bekmambetov, the man behind the too-long ignored Nightwatch / Daywatch double-feature. From the 20-story skyscraper leap in the opening sequence, this is a film that rides on his imaginative shoulders. Bullets bend, cars somersault and Angelina’s butt cheeks literally defy gravity! It’s crass entertainment (Morgan Freeman drops an F-bomb, for Christ’s sake!) but the advertising never promised anything less. Universal’s Blu-ray does a phenomenal job of making Bekmambetov’s audacious images look pretty and bulks up on special features about the original comic series and the elaborate effects work. This is one of those titles that works well with Universal U-Control feature, with pop-video, storyboards and assassin profiles worked into the main film. BD-Live functionality and a digital copy are also included. SPACE CHIMPS: 3D animation is now become common and cheap enough that the results are often...well, common and cheap. But no matter what adults might think of Ham, Luna and Titan’s journey through a wormhole to a strange planet of Teletubbies under attack by one of our own NASA probes, the only opinion that counts are from critics who still choose their cereal because of the toy inside. As a sort of scientific study, I sat my 6-year-old son in our observation chamber (i.e., the basement) and spent as much time watching his reactions as I did the movie. The exit poll elicited comments like, “It was good. I liked the monsters. Best movie ever.” Of course, this is the same child who thought Ernest Scared Stupid was on par with Hitchcock’s Psycho. But truth be told, he never noticed the bad script, poor voice-acting (by third tier SNLers like Andy Samberg and Kenan Thompson) and general unimaginative animation style. He just liked the monsters. Nothing’s wrong with a little cinematic junk food once in a while, and Space Chimps goes down like a bag of cool ranch Doritos. Fox’s Blu-ray really pops visually, but even they seemed to know the score when it came to the extras, tacking on only a brief Casting Session and short Still Gallery.