Film

Three dimensions are one too many for this flat tale of geological grandiosity starring good-natured B-movie staple Brendan Fraser as Trevor Anderson, a spelunking professor genially obsessed with someday exploring the nooks and crannies of Earth’s extreme (and extremely theoretical) subterranean world. Haunted by his brilliant brother, Max, whose appetite for adventure on the scientific fringes led to his disappearance during an expedition years before, Trevor has devoted his life (and his university’s expensive computer equipment) to continually monitoring the planet’s crust for any trace of seismic insights.

Through an achingly contrived series of events, Trevor suddenly must tend to Max’s only child, Sean (Hutcherson), who serendipitously helps to connect the scribbling in his father’s copy of Jules Verne’s titular novel with Trevor’s computer data and reveals the possibility of untold mantle revelations in Iceland. Leaving the film’s obligatory exposition behind them, the duo rushes off to Reykjavík and stumbles into an amusement-park narrative in which highly brittle muscovite minerals and explosive magnesium veins join bioluminescent birds, football-size piranhas and a Tyrannosaurus rex for inner-core mayhem. Director Eric Brevig revels in 3-D gimmickry, with items being dutifully pointed, thrown, lunged and showered with exhaustive enthusiasm. The joyride is relentless.