Tweedy book-collector Mo Folchart (Fraser) is just the chap to boost the flagging TV ratings of Jackanory: when he tells a story aloud the characters spring to life.

Well, it certainly beats Dawn French or Michael Aspel settling down with Lizzie Dripping for the umpteenth time.

He’s a “Silvertongue” and his bookish abilities are much in demand…especially from Capricorn (Serkis), a baldy villain inadvertently liberated by Mo from the pages of the fantasy novel Inkheart many years before.

Evilly flourishing in a rather dinky Italian mountain village surrounded by his henchmen – a sort of cross between SS stormtroopers and Slipknot roadies – Capricorn wants to make the fictitious Inkheart nasty The Shadow fire-spewing fact with the help of a storytelling session from Mo.

To this end, he follows him on a book-buying trip to an Alpine version of Hay-on-Wye and seizes Mo and his 12-year-old daughter Meggie (Bennett) while they’re staying with Mo’s waspish mother-in-law Helen Mirren.

Based on the bestselling children’s novel by Cornelia Funke, this fantasy adventure is blessed with a literary conceit which transfers extremely well to the big screen.

The supernatural power of a Silvertongue gives the sfx people a bookish banquet on which to feast. So we get unicorns, flying monkeys and even Middle Eastern cut-throats literally dropping in from The Arabian Nights.

Serkis has a ball, seemingly channelling his panto nastiness through a Keith Allen impression while Fraser is always going to be the first casting call when it comes to likeable leading men and bullet-dodging father figures.

The largely superfluous presence of Mirren’s battleaxe and Jim Broadbent’s beret-wearing Inkheart author would suggest that rather too much source material has been shoehorned into the narrative when perhaps it would have been better to excise their respective chapters.

Nevertheless, Paul Bettany is given a chance to atone for the ecclesiastical horror that was The Da Vinci Code as Dustfinger, a fire-eater trapped outside the pages of the book and Bennett’s young heroine is one teenage girl whose pig-tails you don’t want to yank.

Gamely played and impressively filmed (in the Liguria area of Italy), it’s good, Saturday matinee-type fun. If it were a book…you couldn’t put it down. Word up. 

Tim Evans