Title: Land of the Lost
Studio: Universal
Director: Brad Silberling
Actors: Will Ferrell, Danny McBride, Anna Friel, Jorma Taccone, John Boylan
In commemoration of Land of the Lost earning seven nominations at this year’s Razzies, I think it’s only fitting that I serve up a review of this prehistoric waste of time.
Back when Will Ferrell was on Saturday Night Live, he was a king. He owned every scene he was in…which was pretty much all of them. But, like so many popular comedians on that show, he left at the height of his popularity to make bigger bucks on the bigger screen.
At first, movies like Old School and Anchorman seemed to promise a high quality of comedy…something many other SNL alumni-turned-movie-actors can’t claim. But as more and more scripts came his way, so too did the regrettable projects. And thus, Land of the Lost.
Ferrell plays Dr. Rick Marshall, a seemingly simple-minded scientist who, as it would turn out, is actually one of the greatest minds of our era. Ridiculed and ostracized for his bizarre space/time warp theories, Marshall finally builds a makeshift time-warp machine to prove his critics wrong…then it’s – accidentally– off to a land of dinosaurs and monkey-men.
Land of the Lost is (technically) based on the TV show of the same name, but honestly, it bares little to no resemblance to the source material whatsoever. That can pay off sometimes, after all, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica is far superior to the 70s version. However, this is no such case. It really raises the question why a profane, occasionally risqué film would base itself on a family-friendly 70s television show. Not that I particularly care that it’s edgier than the show, I’m just wondering how many parents took their kids to see something “from when they were a kid”. Whoops.
The movie is occasionally funny, but for the most part, feels as though every joke is only half told…like the scene changes before the punchline actually kicks in. The plot is almost non-existent, and instead, each scene feels like it is a sketch, separate and isolated from every other scene. That might be forgivable if every “sketch” was actually funny, but despite Will Ferrell and Danny McBride’s natural chemistry, even they can’t salvage a half-assed script with half-formed jokes.
Perhaps many of the “incomplete jokes” can be credited to the fact that a large portion of this movie was pure improvisation. Improv may be more challenging and impressive if you can pull it off, but unfortunately for Ferrell, you don’t get bonus points simply for effort.
Land of the Lost is another chapter in the dumb-comedy line up of many of Ferrell’s films. Diehard fans may want to see this simply to see their favourite man-child doing his thing, but I just recommend popping in one of the SNL: The Best of Will Ferrell DVDs instead.
