All Critics (155)
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Top Critics (33)
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Fresh (93)
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Rotten (62)
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DVD (8)
Most of the movie, directed by Eric Brevig, is as daft, outlandish, and speedy as it needs to be, and, for all its newfangled effects, touchingly old-fashioned in its reverence for the Jules Verne novel that inspired it.
Perfectly charming as well as predictably eye-popping.
Flat and predictable, though the visuals are often striking.
If 3D is indeed the future of movies, we're going to need something more substantial than Journey to the Center of the Earth to convince us.
If, at this moment, the child next to you grabs your arm and hollers "Duck!", the movie will have been worth the ticket price.
Journey shows that Brevig knows exactly what visual effects can do -- and more important, what they can't.
Brendan Fraser's physical dexterity and comic timing are laid out in good order here, and "Journey" is pretty much a Frasermobile. Without him, it just doesn't go anywhere.
Journey relentlessly dishes out the action and offers the bespectacled audience plenty of goopy, grabby 3-D jolts, but it all resembles a run of the mill video game. Brevig can't shake the material loose from its unbridled artificiality."
Whilst 3D glasses might mask this lapse of originality by putting it all in your face, from a standard visual plane, the creative potential of Verne's novel appears to be inexcusably wasted.
A live-action Looney Tunes cartoon!
For this adult...it was a chore, in 2-D or 3-D, and not even the high definition helped. (2-D/3-D Blu-ray Edition)
...rather juvenile...with many of its shots intended more to show off the 3-D process than to further its story line.
Brendan Fraser's playful force of personality rules, 3D or no 3D, one of the few funny guys who could grab attention away from a dinosaur in assault mode, in the center of the earth or anywhere else on the planet.
Many of the engaging scenes can be enjoyed the old fashioned way, minus the 3D glasses, simply for the sheer infusion of wacky humor and that playful force of personality Fraser provides. Who knew science fiction and comedy could reactivate Jules Verne.
The movie proves the perfect showcase for 3D. I can't say that it does the same for Fraser.
It's all good clean fun: a rattling good yarn, in fact, with mostly nicely modulated performances from Fraser, Hutcherson and Bream, emphasising confidence, growth, solidarity and self-reliance.
Fraser salvages his reputation as a solid, matinee-style action hero in this family-oriented fantasy.
Brevig does a barely competent job of imitating the Indiana Jones movies, and seems more hindered than helped by his chosen format...
Poor Brendan Fraser, he must have known he had nothing to work with here, he looks as if he's sleepwalking through the role, not a career highlight for him.
It's all curiously uninvolving, and it's only Fraser's goofy grin and slapstick physicality that hold any character interest whatsoever.
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