BY LARRY CARROLL | Buckle up, kids, because we've been called in for a very important mission. The movie world is in great danger - Bringing Down the House is still number one at the box office - and if an alternative form of entertainment isn't discovered, it would ensure certain boredom for another weekend's worth of filmgoers. And so, we've been dispatched to make a dangerous, unprecedented journey into the core - no, not the center of the Earth, but the actual movie The Core.

There are a lot of terrifying elements that would scare others from making such a trip. Recent "end of the world" movies, like Armageddon and Deep Impact, were memorable for little more than being loud, and the trailer for this movie makes it look like it's cut from the same cloth. Core has solid character actors in it, but no major stars, usually a sign that the script couldn't get any A-listers excited enough to sign up. The director, Jon Amiel, has made a career out of such mediocrity as Entrapment, Copycat and The Man Who Knew Too Little. Most tellingly, any time a movie with this high a "popcorn factor" comes out at a time other than the summer, the movie studio usually doesn't have much faith in its product.

But, mission control has assured us that our mission has a high probability of success. Aaron Eckhart (In the Company of Men), Stanley Tucci (Big Trouble), Bruce Greenwood (Below), Alfre Woodard (Mumford), and the man himself, Delroy Lindo (The Cider House Rules) are in the film. Hilary Swank (Boys Don't Cry) and DJ Qualls (Road Trip) might have cranked out their share of junk over the last few years, but they can be endearing actors. And the plot, about a team of scientists sent to kickstart the planet's core when they discover it has stalled, is original enough to be intriguing.

So, we load ourselves into our vessel - a giant cineplex movie theater with stadium seating and those funky lights that outline the walkways - and get ready for takeoff. The captain counts down, the lights dim, and up comes the Paramount symbol, launching us deep into the Earth. The film starts out very promisingly, with a genuinely creepy sequence that has seventeen people suddenly dropping dead in a ten-block radius at precisely the same moment. From there, in a scene inspired by The Birds, we see disoriented pigeons furiously attack a London family. Some strange things are going on, all over the world.

So far, the audience's journey to The Core is smooth sailing - the film is at its best when showing the ramifications of the stalled planet with these eerie scenarios. And when we meet Dr. Josh Keyes (Eckhart), his cool, rugged, rumpled figure teaching a class is reminiscent of Indiana Jones, which is never a bad thing. Next, we get to know the eager Major "Beck" Childs (Swank) and the somber Colonel Iverson (Greenwood) as they crash land a space shuttle into the Los Angeles River during rush hour. Wow, our trip is making great time - we're only twenty minutes or so into the movie and we've already had three memorable scenes (the crash, the birds and the sudden deaths) thrown our way. Things are looking good.

But then, out of nowhere, our vessel starts to come under attack. Weapons of Lame Destruction are being shot as us! Look out! When Keyes goes before the military to explain the state of the world, he tells them (and us) his theory - that the Earth's core has stalled - in simple enough terms for anyone to grasp. But still, Amiel feels the need to have him conveniently locate a peach, an aerosol can and a lighter, so he can do a "this is your brain on drugs" demonstration for high-ranking government officials who would require no such theatrics. Then the plausibility of the mission gets stretched further and further, as we are introduced to a parade of inventions that aren't even close to really existing - x-ray machines that see through any kind of solid rock, a phallic ship that digs through the ground like a worm (and was built in only three months!), a laser that can drill a hole through a mountain in seconds - all of which are quickly accepted by the rationale that these scientists are crazy, eccentric folk who create these things in their basements without telling anyone.

As the "terranauts" prepare for their mission to restart the core by setting off nuclear bombs, the audience's tolerance takes on some significant damage. Look out, at 10 o'clock, it's the stereotypical computer geek who can do anything with a keystroke! The Core recycles the laziest screenwriting convention of the last five years by giving us Rat (Qualls), who is (let's all say it together) "the best hacker in the world". I thought Ryan Phillippe in Antitrust was the best hacker in the world? Or wasn't it Hugh Jackman in Swordfish? By declaring him as such, the movie is basically declaring that anything he does is plausible as far as they are concerned. The government wants to keep the mission a secret, so they recruit Rat to monitor the entire Internet and suppress any speculation that could lead to the truth getting out. When the screenwriters need someone to stop a doomsday machine, get secret information to the terranauts, or tell something to every single person in the whole world at once - guess who knows how to do it? Qualls is good for a few laughs, but his character is the worst part of the movie.

The good news is, though, that the audience's quest for entertainment never gets any worse than it does at this point. Rat's introduction comes at the same time as another low for the film, a laughably bad special-effects team powered destruction of Rome that looks like it was put together by the interns. Most of the other FX in the film, I must say, are solid-to-great, which just makes this lightning storm disaster stick out all the more.

So, things aren't looking quite so good for us at this point. But, like the ship that is thrusting the characters towards the center of our planet, the movie picks up significant momentum as it goes along. Once they are in the ground and on their way, we get to know this eccentric bunch pretty well, and the way they play off each other is inspired enough to make you care: Keyes is an awkward antihero who gets some good one-liners in; Childs is too self-assured for her own good; Zimsky (Tucci) is an egotistical Carl Sagan-wannabe who dictates his thoughts aloud into a tape recorder; Brazleton was screwed over by Zimski years ago and sees the success of this mission as his last chance at making a mark on the world; Leveque (Tcheky Karyo, The Patriot), the most mellow of the bunch, wants to save the world simply because his family is a part of it. The more you learn about these people, the more you care, and it's their personalities that hold this ship together. I can't honestly say that there's more development of them then there was in the characters of Armageddon or Deep Impact, but there somehow seems to be more meaning behind what they have to say. This gives it all the greater resonance when, inevitably, people start giving their lives for the good of the cause.

Like the crew in The Core, we see some memorable sights as we press along on our mission. When the depletion of the electro-magnetic field causes a single ray of unfiltered sunlight to get through to Earth, it results in a memorable destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge. This is accompanied by the oddities that the crew discovers hundreds of miles beneath the Earth's surface, such as a minefield made of enormous diamonds or a breathtaking crystallic Grand Canyon. A lot of these things require the viewer to lend some of his or her own imagination to what's up on the screen, but if you're willing to do so you will be rewarded.

In the end, the mission is a success for the audience because The Core doesn't take itself too seriously (except for Swank, who needs to forget she's an Oscar winner and loosen up) and is powered by the ultimate fuel: imagination. It isn't a perfect film, but it's a perfectly fine film to tide us over until the summer.

GRADE: B