The premise of The Core would have you believe that the inner core of the earth has stopped spinning, causing massive thunderstorms, electromagnetic surges that stop pacemakers and, well, something that causes birds in London to go absolutely mad. And that’s just for starters! College professor Aaron Eckhart believes that within a year, all life around the world will cease to exist.

Eckhart convinces enough military bigwigs that the situation is real and deadly, if they don’t do something – namely, drill down to the center of the earth and jumpstart the planet. Hey, whaddaya know, Delroy Lindo’s been working on just such a machine in the middle of the desert! So the two get in the ship (which looks like the world’s most dangerous dildo) with astronaut Hilary Swank, pompous scientist Stanley Tucci and a few others and get down to business.

Ludicrous, right? Of course. But isn’t all of science fiction? Men can’t go to Mars, scientists haven’t fused their DNA with flies and that whole time machine thing doesn’t work, either. It’s all about suspending your disbelief, and, for a while anyway, The Core plays it straight enough that you just buy into it. It’s not until the mission is well underway that said suspension starts falling apart, probably because the movie is just too darned long. And the mission – its Armageddon half – is actually the least interesting part of the movie. I much more enjoyed the setup – the Deep Impact half – where the disaster scenes carry a little mystery, the Space Shuttle is forced to land in a Los Angeles sewer ditch and citizens panic as all of Rome’s monuments are blown to model bits.

The acting isn’t all that bad, just the dialogue. Eckhart makes for a likeable all-brains hero, though this must be one of the easiest slum jobs for an Academy Award winner, as Swank has to do little more than sit in a chair and rattle off some numbers. The weakest link here, however, is Road Trip freak D.J. Qualls as a hacker named Rat. He likes Xena and Hot Pockets, and can do anything with computers – and is just plain annoying. He’s this film’s Jar-Jar

The DVD has a making-of documentary and several deleted scenes, but the movie itself is so padded, by the time it was over, I didn’t care to extend my Core experience. This film isn’t the disaster critics made it out to be; it’s just a disaster film that doesn’t know when to quit, but it’s certainly worth a rental.