YMMV / The Core

• Ensemble Dark Horse: Stanley Tucci steals the movie and swallows it whole for breakfast.
• Genius Bonus: Kung fu, while usually used as a word for martial arts, actually means something closer to "hard work"; it could easily be applied to your field of expertise. When Rat calls hacking his kung fu, he is 100% correct.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This movie has the sun literally being a deadly laser.
• Ho Yay: So much between Keyes and Serge. They're almost always seen together in every scene they're in, they have a very close friendship. Nothing is more evident than Keyes's anguish reaction towards Serge's Cruel and Unusual Death and his subsequent rant on Beck for letting Serge die.
• Narm:
  • Rat: "It's the whales! They're singing!"
  • Keyes emotionally chewing out Beck for letting Serge die.
  • Zimsky's anger-fueled breakdown after reaching his Rage Breaking Point on how stupid he thinks the team's plan is.
  • The man with the pacemaker who faceplants his desk in the first scene when an electromagnetic charge shorts out the pacemakers of every individual in Boston. The way that it is filmed is so sudden and out of nowhere that it borders on Crosses the Line Twice territory.
• So Bad, It's Good: Does it have any artistic merit? Not really. Does it have any scientific merit? Absolutely not. Is it nevertheless entertaining? Oooh yeah.
• Special Effects Failure: The CGI at times is quite impressive, but more often than not looks like they came straight off a Syfy B-movie.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Hilary Swank, especially in contrast to the screaming Ham and Cheese provided by Stanley Tucci and the visible amusement of Delroy Lindo. Aaron Eckhart is a borderline case in that his performance is fairly straight-faced, but he recounted in a later interview that he and Tucci nearly peed themselves laughing during certain scenes because the movie was SO ridiculous.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Beck for letting Serge die because she didn't do the simple task of flipping some override switches which would've saved his life. She tries to justify this by saying that the decompression could have spread to the rest of the ship, but from what we see she had more than enough time to get him out before sealing it off. Even worse was that Keyes kept telling her to do so but she didn't.

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