The Core (2003)

“The Core” is an End of the World Thriller that had me screaming “Burn, baby, burn!” Every minute in this John Amiel-directed film is a bust, making the similar but thoroughly watchable “2012” seem like high art. The film’s most mind-numbing scene has the sun’s microwave heat melting the entire San Francisco Bay Bridge, but only giving the living motorists below sunburn. But that’s just bad science, and this is the place of miracles. Case in point: Aaron Eckhart is made haggard, dull and whiny, while every bit of intelligence that embodies Hilary Swank is erased. Stanley Tucci fares worse as the egomaniac physicist whose shadiness is best demonstrated by his wet-noodle wrist. (Homophobic? You bet.) The badness of the scenes where our heroes endlessly bicker like spoiled children are bottomed only by the ones in which they mourn and weep over one another, but truly appear like they could give a crap. At one point Tucci’s doomed academic sighs, “What the fuck am I doing?” I imagine it’s a phrase the cast often spoke. D-