The Core: Critic Reviews

It's a schlockier Armageddon crossed with Fantastic Voyage, minus the fun.

The brazen silliness of The Core is becalming and inauthentic, like taking a bath in nondairy coffee creamer. The Earth core's inability to turn is mirrored in the cast's inability to give the picture any spin.

Jules Verne this isn't, but it makes for fairly diverting escapist fare.

Sloppily made, poky, extra cheesy adventure.

A two-hour pleasure cruise.

The Core is such a feat of go-for-broke heroism and you-gotta-be -kiddin'-me ridiculousness that it almost qualifies as a feel-good diversion -- with just a quarter of the runaway jingoism of your average disaster extravaganza.

Undigestible fusion of worst-case earth science and leaden pacing.

When taken as an old-fashioned adventure with a comic-book plot, The Core works well. But at 130 minutes it wears out its welcome, and like Earth's balky core, it sputters and stalls.

An enjoyable, forgettable film.

I have such an unreasonable affection for this movie, indeed, that it is only by slapping myself alongside the head and drinking black coffee that I can restrain myself from recommending it.

Good science fiction awakens a sense of awe, and even mediocre sci-fi sometimes manages wonder. But The Core does neither.

The Core is unabashed Hollywood spectacle, but with a cast of up-from-indie actors that makes the cataclysmic kitsch all the more fun to behold.

The Core is formulaic Hollywood swill done on such an epic scale of incompetency, it must be seen.

Despite its predictability, The Core offers a healthy serving of suspense and special effects.

More palatable than most pictures of its ilk due to its keen awareness of its own preposterousness, a self-knowledge exuberantly expressed by a mostly live-wire cast.

No one's going to confuse The Core with art -- or even a good film -- but it's 25 minutes longer than The Hours and I had at least 25 times as much fun.

This is one shelved project that should have stayed on the shelf.

There's a marked absence of panic in The Core.

The only pressing burden in this deep interior world is the question: What in or on Earth is a cast this good doing in a movie this ridiculous?

So howlingly awful that it has unwittingly found a place in that elite group of films that can claim to be 'so bad they're good.'

It's a popcorn movie with brains.