Ben Barnes, Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell

Let go the Lord of the Rings. Hold your Harry Potters. For our own, our very own, C S Lewis' film franchise is finally coming into its own.

With this, the second of the series, Narnia moves into the first division — with a further five potentially still to come. For any sequel, two out of three ain't bad — and this one is scoring three out of five!

What I mean is the Lion is back (eventually) and the witch as well, albeit briefly, but the wardrobe appears to have been totally forgotten!

We begin beyond the wardrobe, in Narnia itself, where the birth of a boy leads directly to the attempted assassination and enforced exile of the youth called Caspian.

In what seems a peculiarly Potteresque moment, the children are whisked back to Narnia via a tube train — except it seems this is also how old C S did it himself, so maybe J K Rowling was actually taking his "inspiration" .

Narnia 2 comes in at a bum-numbing two hours 24 minutes but director and co-writer Andrew Adamson, who was director and executive producer on Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, takes time to build up not only his characters, but also the intricate story and tension.

Thus he ably juggles the two time periods, not just the relatively short section set in London during World War Two but the fictional land of Narnia itself.

The four Penvensie children, Susan (Anna Popplewell), Lucy (Georgie Henley), Edmund (Skandar Keynes), and Peter (William Moseley) have aged but a year since the first movie — which was released just over two and a half years ago — but Narnia has had more than 1,300 years pass by.

The trees have stopped their dancing. Aslan the lion has been missing for years. The country has been invaded by the evil Telmarines and become, as one of the characters laments, "a more savage place".

Prince Caspian practically gasps with the predictable, resounding with cliche ("Run!") and daft dialogue ("I wish we could have had more time together," the Prince tells Susan, who says: "We never would have worked ... I'm 1,300 years older than you") but also crackles with imagination and looks magnificent almost all the way through.

The imagination bit, however, includes a swashbuckling mouse, well voiced and imbued with personality by Eddie Izzard, but who looks and moves and acts very similiarly to Puss-In-Boots from Shrek (Adamson directed the first two and wrote the third).

Story-wise it looks as though Lewis was well steeped in Richard the Lionheart and Ivanhoe territory.

The real action is a long time coming, almost half-way through the film, and they seem to have cut corners on some of the vast use of computer-generated imagery.

And the Christian symbolism, not exactly over-emphasised in the first film, is again underplayed. While Aslan (Liam Neeson reprising his wisdom-of-the-ages role) is obviously the God/Father figure and there is strong Christology around the theme of the enemy being the only one who can save, not to mention the morality of taking a life.

The final battle sequence, however, is wonderfully staged, original and exciting as the warriors literally have the ground cut from under them. Altogether one of the best cinema experiences you can expect this summer.