Families looking for something to while away summer could do a lot worse than make this particular trip to the earth's core.

Jules Verne's evergreen action yarn has seen everyone from Pat Boone in 1959 to odd comic Emo Philips make the trip thirty years later…but this one is "the first live-action, narrative motion picture to be shot in digital 3D."

What that basically means is that you get everything from a cockroach's feelers waving over an audience of squealing ankle biters to a foul-fanged piranha leaping over their ducking heads. It's great.

Brendan Fraser - an actor seldom out of khaki - is the amiable college geophysicist who follows in the footsteps of his missing explorer brother…and finds himself tumbling down a volcanic tube in Iceland.

He’s joined while hurtling towards the earth’s core by his cocky nephew Sean (Bridge To Terabithia’s Hutcherson) and nubile mountain guide Hannah (Briern).

Miraculously landing safely with a big splash, they find themselves in a surreal universe where mushrooms grow twenty feet tall, subterranean seas lap on sandy shores and dinosaurs exist despite having no apparent sources of food.

But let’s not get too pedantic. Just enjoy it for what it is – a Saturday morning pictures yarn with a bigger budget and a fancy 3D camera borrowed from James “Titanic” Cameron.

OK it’s a commercial template for a theme park ride…but it's also a thrillingly enjoyable action caper that makes joyous use of the clever-dick technology available to it.

First-time director Eric Brevig, who cut his teeth as a special effects supremo on Total Recall and Pearl Harbor, know his craft and keeps the action simple and effective.

Highpoints include Sean gingerly hopping across a chasm on shifting stepping stones held in place by a magnetic force, a drooling T-Rex and a mine truck ride admittedly pinched from Indiana Jones.

What helps is the likeable cast. Fraser is an affable old hand at this sort of thing, Hutcherson is one of the few American teens you don’t want to slap and Briern acquits herself well in her first major role.

It’s great, family fun. Go the journey.

Tim Evans