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Directed by Eric Brevig

Written by Michael Weiss,

Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin

Starring Brendan Fraser, Josh Hutcherson and Anita Briem

Classification: PG

Billed as the first live-action 3-D digital movie, Journey to the Center of the Earth is definitely in your face. From the start, as the audience is subjected to a sink's-eye view of Brendan Fraser spitting mouthwash directly into the lens. Yuck.

From there on, Journey offers a regular poke every few minutes: a bouncing yo-yo, a bug's antenna, flying fish with giant teeth, man-eating plants, flocks of phosphorescent birds. Not exactly a movie in the usual sense, not exactly a ride, Journey is more of a virtual theme-park simulation and possibly a milestone of immersive entertainment.

Based on Jules Verne's 1864 science fantasy, Journey has been shot many times before on film and television, most notably in Henry Levin's 1959 version with James Mason and Pat Boone. Verne's narrative of sequential adventures is ready-made for this sort of cave-of-terrors approach. The movie is made by a veteran special-effects supervisor, Eric Brevig (Total Recall, The Day After Tomorrow, The Island) taking his first turn in the director's seat.

Like Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it's a necklace of big stunt sequences on a spindly chain of plot. The difference is in tone: Spielberg's movie felt creaky and self-congratulatory but it had its wow moments; Journey neither offends nor dazzles. Though the effects are better than most 3-D, they're not jaw-dropping. Most first-graders will instantly recognize that the science is bogus, but they're bound to like the idea of Brendan Fraser as a big, bumbling uncle.

Fraser, who stars in his third Mummy film this summer in a similar role, is essentially the tour conductor here, and he combines his bulky athleticism with a lot of mugging.

He plays Dr. Trevor Anderson, a geek geology professor who is harassed by his supercilious department head (Saturday Night Live's Seth Meyers). The lab Trevor runs, named after his brother, Max, is about to be shut down. Trevor arrives back at his house, where he has forgotten to prepare for the arrival of his nephew, Sean (Josh Hutcherson, Robin Williams's son in RV ), who's a generic sulky adolescent stuck with his nose in his PlayStation Portable (oddly enough, not a product tie-in – the game is out on Nintendo DS).

Along with the nephew comes a box of Uncle Max's possessions, including, by the long arm of coincidence, a copy of Jules Verne's novel, with a secret code that predicts an incipient seismic rupture in Iceland.

Trevor cashes in his giant coin collection and uncle and nephew fly to Iceland, where they meet Hannah, played by Anita Briem, a wispy Icelandic-by-way-of-English actress, who makes about as much impression as the giant dandelion fluff that blows around the underworld. She plays the mountain-guide daughter of one of Max's colleagues who agrees to take them to a seismic sensor. While the three are hiding in a cave from a storm, they are walled up by a rock slide and are forced to descend into a mine shaft that begins their intra-terrestrial journey.

With a cast of just three principal actors, and Fraser as the only star, Journey to the Center of the Earth is a stripped-down affair. (Inexplicably, three writers are credited with the script, in which the actors keep reminding each other to look out.)

The humans are essentially props for the real star: the virtual world, which has the audience hurtling through subterranean tunnels, playing baseball with flying fish, skipping across floating rocks over a deep chasm or watching a dinosaur snapping at Fraser's buttocks. The one dissonant note is a persistent, badly rendered prehistoric bluebird, which keeps flitting around like one of Cinderella's feathered dressers.

Ideally, Journey to the Center of the Earth should be shown not in its current, exhausting 90-minute format, but in a half-dozen 15-minute hits – preferably after school – with each of the cliffhangers given some space to contemplate. At recess, kids could argue about the 30 ways that Trevor, Hannah and Sean might escape before the next calamity. What a shame to waste so much cringing and ducking on a one-time event.