The Core

The Core is purely average in every respect. It’s a bit suspenseful, a bit boring, a bit sentimental, a bit stupid and a bit funny and pleasantly easy-going. Something between Armageddon and Deep Impact, but neither properly action-packed nor sufficiently psychological. A light adventure with technically brilliant execution and decent acting. (05/26/2003)

I would liken this film to a colonoscopy. It's also a probe, you don't look forward to it at all, when it comes, it hurts a bit at times, after it's over you say to yourself that it wasn't that bad and in an hour you don't even remember it anymore... (07/15/2006)

It's not stupid at all... perhaps phantasmagorical, exaggerated, naïve, but at the same time amusing and free of the repulsive nationalist connotations of some of its genre companions. A physicist might tear his hair out while watching the far-fetched plots and the logic takes a nap, but the tension is there, the acting performances are ok. The tricks are horribly artificial, but they fit the cardboard aesthetic of The Core quite well. Definitely a better disaster film than The Day After Tomorrow or Armageddon. At least it's not trying to be a big beautiful A film - it's just trying to have fun, which, when watched with low expectations, is pretty good. (08/24/2005)

A stupid screenplay, lame dialogs, overly long and terrible effects. It’s not boring and is just about watchable, although primarily thanks to the “so bad that it’s good" syndrome. But it really does require you to switch off your brain and take it with a huge pinch of salt. The only thing that is passable here are the actors; in fact they are fairly average, but to give the bland and one-dimensional characters some sort of depth is a success. In relative terms, at least. The screenwriters should go back to junior high for a bit of coaching. They evidently missed a semester or two of physics and chemistry. (04/08/2005)

I appreciate the quite decent idea of going down instead of up for a change, but there was a lack of budget. This film needed more visual effects, better actors, better music, more action-packed excitement, a better and more grandiose ending, and above all, more exaggeration. Armageddon fulfills all of this, The Core does not. (01/26/2004)

A classically bad American disaster film that also dabbles in sci-fi, which is too far-fetched, overly melodramatic, and taken too seriously, even though it would have been much better if treated as a classic B-movie, albeit with fairly good effects. The cast was good, and that's the only thing that deserves to be praised. (09/04/2017)