Much like when you get whipped with chains every day, sometimes it's hard to tell whether a bad situation is getting better or you're just getting used to it.
I used to hate my other job, but now I don't even notice when the trains run over me. And at least the other rails don't talk much. Lying on the ground perfectly still all day might sound like a pretty crummy way to make a living, but after a decade or so, you won't think it's so bad. Like my ex-hobo coworkers say, it's better to be a rail than to ride them.
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
Still, it's not like the job's cooler than when I started. I'm just inured. The same thing can happen while watching a movie franchise. You get wrapped up in the universe and the characters and suddenly realize you're watching A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: God, Why Are We Still Doing This and one day you'll be dead.
So far, The Chronicles of Narnia has been 0-2. It was hard for me to imagine the third would make the leap to "good." But with its mythology firmly in place and its weaker actors out of the picture, the deck's clear to deliver a decent entry in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
When Georgie Henley and Skandar Keynes unexpectedly return to Narnia, their obnoxious cousin Will Poulter gets dragged along, too. They're quickly reunited with king Ben Barnes, who's gone sailing in search of the lost lords of his father.
Their search leads them to an island where the locals are being enslaved and delivered to a strange green mist. To rescue them and find the lost lords, they'll have to sail into the uncharted east.
As the sequel to a movie that was barely OK that was itself a sequel to a movie that was pretty crummy, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is in perfect position to benefit from lowered expectations. I think I can safely speak for the entire world when I say people look forward to new Narnia entries with the same giddy enthusiasm they have for clipping their toenails.
Dawn Treader attempts to live up to this legacy of failure by gussying up the plot with a bunch of cliches. It turns out the seven lords also have seven swords, which the children will need to collect all of if they want to break the evil spell on Dark Island, where your worst nightmares become reality. Given how potentially awful that bundle of tired old business could have been, Dark Island is apparently located in the very theater where I watched this.
Thankfully, an underdeveloped, hole-shot plot is largely irrelevant. I mean, sure, when Barnes draws special attention to one of the holes, you're likely to think "Hey yeah, how do you dorks plan to find a lone sword on a whole island that will meanwhile be busy trying to kill you with manifested fears of spiders, demons, and showing up naked to school?"
But director Michael Apted handles his pat quest briskly, striking a nice balance between action and character. Poulter is especially good as the type of defensive blowhard who needs to be repeatedly dunked in a vat of something that smells bad. Meanwhile, his skeptical presence defuses some of the argle-bargle of the plot, and his transformation to a braver, friendlier kid is well-earned. Considering this transformation is aided by an oversized swordfighting mouse, it's surprisingly poignant.
Apted gets similar if lesser mileage out of Henley and Keynes' passage toward adulthood. For once, the Narnian kids are compelling, their relationships worth caring about. That will go a long way towards shoring up a half-baked plot.
Grade: B
