THE CORE
½
Much-appreciated escapism.
Running time: 135 minutes. Rated PG-13 (life/death situations, brief profanity). At the Astor Plaza, the Clearview First and 62nd St., the Battery Park City, others.
DELIRIOUSLY silly fun with a hefty budget and a grade-A cast, “The Core” reminds me of one of my all-time favorite the-world-is-ending flicks, Irwin Allen’s “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.”
That cheesy 1962 Saturday-matinee epic starred Walter Pidgeon, Joan Fontaine and Peter Lorre in a scientifically improbable yarn about a submarine trying to explode atom bombs into the earth’s radiation belt to put out a fire threatening to incinerate all life on earth.
The longer but more briskly paced “The Core” has a crew of scientists and astronauts on a no more credible – and no less entertaining – journey to the center of the earth, hoping to set off nuclear explosions that will hopefully avert the end of all life.
Be warned: This is the sort of movie where you need to check your brains at the popcorn counter.
If it bothers you that the crew can maintain radio communication with the surface through hundreds of miles of solid rock – in an era when cell phone signals can’t penetrate parts of Manhattan – this is probably not the movie for you.
Why are they undertaking this Mission: Improbable, anyway? The earth’s core has stopped spinning, disrupting its magnetic field and creating all sorts of catastrophes.
The Golden Gate Bridge collapses. The Colosseum in Rome is destroyed in an intense lightning storm.
Very confused birds start crashing into London’s Trafalgar Square.
Navigational gear fails on the space shuttle, which makes an emergency landing in the Los Angeles River.
When pacemakers suddenly quit, leaving dozens of people dead in Vancouver – er, Boston – the military calls in geophysics brainiac Dr. Josh Keyes (Aaron Eckhart) for a diagnosis.
After consulting with Dr. Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci), an egotistical and thoroughly untrustworthy Carl Sagan type, Josh warns that everyone will perish in six months unless they use atomic weapons to get the core moving again.
By lucky coincidence, eccentric scientific genius Dr. Ed “Braz” Brazzleton (Delroy Lindo) in the Utah desert has developed a ship that can use laser beams to cut through materials as hard as diamonds – and withstand temperatures exceeding 9,000 degrees.
The commander of the crash-landed space shuttle (Bruce Greenwood) takes charge of the mission with the tomboyish Major Rebecca “Beck” Childs (Oscar winner Hilary Swank) as second in command, and a French atomic weapons expert (Tcheky Karyo) along for the very dangerous ride with Josh, Zimsky and Braz.
You can count on brave deaths occurring in roughly reverse order of the actors’ billing.
There are also diamonds the size of football fields, lots of scientific skulduggery and a teenager uber-hacker (D.J. Qualls) who keeps word of the mission off the Internet.
You might argue the cast is overmatched for the material, but the normally grim Eckhart channels his inner Owen Wilson as the wisecracking Josh, who at one point surveys the scientists brought in to work on the project and proclaims, “This looks like a meeting of Nobel Winners Anonymous.”
Scene-stealing honors go to Tucci’s Zimsky, who continues dictating his memoirs into a tape recorder even in the most dire circumstances.
Director Jon Amiel (“Entrapment”) and his screenwriters clearly have their tongues pretty far into their cheeks and the film provides as many laughs as it does cheap thrills and cheesy special effects.
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.
