Entertaining but ultimately falls short

Rating: 6/10 (1 February 2005)

The acting was just horrible, in part perhaps because the characters were one dimensional stereotypes. No big deal, this was not that kind of a movie.
The plot had potential But the thing that ruined the potential for me was the lack of attention to detail. A good hard, science fiction work is allowed to stretch the facts for the sake of a plot. But c'mon folks, the remnants of the party re-emerge on the surface and it must be balmy. The heroine's hair isn't even blowing. She looks like she's dressed for a day's jaunt on a mild winter day in Ohio. This is Antarctica, and when they went down in the hole perhaps a day ago at most there was a raging storm. The ice had not melted and they needed an icebreaking ship to get to the island, remember? And the chopper ride to reach the ship was all dressed up as a death defying expedition into the maelstrom of all time.
Then we have a winch which pulls a trolley of sorts up and down the 30 degree grade in the tunnel. We are supposed to believe that this beats an explosion out of the hole, racing just ahead of it. The cables on the winch are shown reeling frantically, as if any such device could in the wildest of imaginations outrace the explosion. At the very least they could have dressed the device up, encasing it in high tech finery in a concession to achieving suspension of disbelief. But you have to see this thing to believe it -- it looks like a medieval well bucket mechanism.
Then the trolley flies out of the shaft, a few seconds ahead of the explosion (apparently the cables on the winch actually beat it). An enormous eruption of flame is followed by shots of our heroes running through town, apparently unphased by what must have been a rather bone jarring impact of the trolley on "terra" frozena after being shot out of the tube.
Oh well. If you go to have twitch fun, it's not all that bad. But it could have been a whole lot better. I suspect that 99% of the effort went into the pyramid, and there was simply nothing left for the rest of the movie.