It’s time to save the world again! Hollywood believes you have an insatiable appetite for these movies. It’s a formula – we’ll put six people together in a space ship and send ‘em out to stop Armegeddon. One will be a foreigner, one will be a racial minority, one will be an annoyance the audience will want to see die, and two will fall in love. There, I just covered five out of the six person crew! I could have done that without ever setting foot in the theatre.

Now that I have that out of the way, “The Core” isn’t a bad movie at all. And the reason is simple – most of the actors stayed serious enough to make this work and the movie is full of special effects and lots of jargon to almost make you believe this could happen.

This time the problem is that the earth’s core is slowing up and needs a jump start. A handpicked crew of “special people” is assigned the task of drilling their way to the center and nuking the core back to life. Thank God for nuclear weapons, because without them we would never be able to save the world. But this movie does get off to a fine start as people with pacemakers collapse and die and birds start smashing into buildings. Oh, and the space shuttle crash lands. Can you say “inappropriate”?

One thing I appreciated about this movie is that there isn’t really a villain. Yes, there’s a shifty looking general lurking about, but he really turns out to be mostly about saving the planet. In fact, where’s the President in this movie? This general seems to have all the power, but isn’t that the way some of you feel about who really runs this country?

This movie didn’t need to be over two hours long. Much of the time is spent trying to figure out how to heroically kill off the crew members. But I have to say, how interesting can a trip to the core of the earth be? I mean, it’s not like deep space. What’s in there anyway? They did a very good job of creating some obstacles along the way with diamonds and huge crystals and, of course, lava. Good special effects here, don’t miss that space shuttle landing in the L.A. River. But too much mushy, pointless sentimental moments kill the momentum. “The Core” is a brave attempt at a very overworked premise. I give it a “5.0”.