Main cast: Aaron Eckhart (Dr Joshua Keyes), Hilary Swank (Major Rebecca Childs), Stanley Tucci (Dr Conrad Zimsky), Delroy Lindo (Dr Ed ‘Braz’ Brazzelton), Tchéky Karyo (Dr Serge Leveque), Bruce Greenwood (Commander Robert Iverson), DJ Qualls (Theodore Donald “Rat” Finch), Alfre Woodard (Dr Talma “Stick” Stickley), and Richard Jenkins (General Thomas Purcell)
Director: Jon Amiel

In The Core, a bunch of scientists bore down the Earth. And when I mean “bore down the Earth”, I do mean every word in that phrase, because I almost fell asleep watching this movie. This disaster movie is filled to the brim with annoying and predictable cliché while laboring under the assumption that this movie is very serious so please pay attention, people – oh please.

Some bad government people have designed some… er, weapon, I guess, that ends up causing the Earth to stop rotating on its axis. So the Earth’s electromagnetic waves are all screwed up, causing people with pacemakers to die – in this case, an entire city, apparently, so McDonald’s really has a lot to answer for. Then pigeons go crazy in London – I knew those people should have done something about them damned birds from the start. The Colosseum gets barbecued. The Golden Gate Bridge becomes the bridge at the bottom of the trench. People, we need a bunch of people to go down to the Earth’s core, blow up some things, and make things alright again! Yup, save the world with nuclear weapons, people!

So we have Dr Joshua Keyes, played by Aaron Eckhart like a sleepwalking sedated ghoul. Rebecca Childs, played by Hilary Swank who right now must really wish she hasn’t won that Best Supporting Actress thing and get the curse of the Oscar that comes along with it. Stanley Tucci plays Conrad, and since Mr Tucci looks like a bad guy, he plays the bad guy. Don’t want to bore the audience with subtlety after all. Serge Leveque is French, so he dies, because we all know French people are enemies of peace and democracy. After he helps the heroes though. Delroy Lindo plays Ed Brazzelton, the token black guy. Together, these walking clichés humorlessly takes a cheap-looking spacecraft down to the core, where there are many cute sparkly pinkish crystals.

In addition to exploding the Earth’s core, these people also destroy the very foundation of logic and fundamental science as we know it. I know movies are allowed to take liberties with facts, but people, not to the extent this movie did. Mind you, after whining that their machines can’t work in water, the next thing I know, these people are traveling in their cheap rented-from-Star Trek craft thingies through water. Wow.

Now, a movie doesn’t have to follow the laws of science to be entertaining. But The Core just isn’t entertaining. The acting is inept and wooden, the special effects are laughably bad, the script is hooey, and frankly, it is hard to imagine that a movie filled with so much badness can be… well, boring, but it is. This is really a case of boring down to the center of the Earth, “boring” being the operative word here.