Land of the Lost

Land of the Lost

Directed by Brad Silberling
Written by Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas
Starring Will Ferrell, Danny McBride and Anna Friel
Classification: PG

The only discernible intention in Land of the Lost , the latest comedy starring Will Ferrell acting like Will Ferrell, seems to have been to take a slight idea and make the least of it in a very expensive way.

The movie is derived from a Saturday-morning live-action series which ran on NBC in the mid-seventies, about a scientist and his son and daughter who fall through a time portal during an earthquake and find themselves in a parallel world of dinosaurs, near-human primates and lizard men. Those who missed the original Land of the Lost , by birth-date or inclination, can extrapolate from any number of similar radio and television series about marooned families. Variations include The Swiss Family Robinson , Lost in Space , Gilligan's Island and even Survivor , right up to J.J. Abram's current hit Lost .

The old Land of the Lost series, known for its amusingly overambitious backdrops and effects, has already been parodied, efficiently, by Mad TV . Essentially, this is sketch-comedy material stretched out without much imagination and a high rate of misfires. The only other reason for its further development into a $100-million summer movie would seem to be as a prequel to another Universal Studios theme park attraction.

Paradoxically, the movie's first and best scene, already recorded in the preview trailers, takes place with two men sitting in chairs: Ferrell is introduced as pompous, crackpot scientist Rick Marshall, trying to push his time-travelling theories on The Today Show while being interviewed by a sneering Matt Lauer.

From there, things move pretty quickly. Three years later, exiled to teaching science to bored elementary-school children, Marshall seems like a has-been - until he receives an inspirational visit from a worshipful Cambridge scholar, Holly (Anna Friel), who urges him to finish his time machine.

The two head out to the desert where, along with a redneck amusement park operator, Will (Danny McBride), they get sucked into a vortex and into another dimension.

After a narrow escape from a Tyrannosaurus rex, they find themselves with monkey-man Chaka ( Saturday Night Live writer Jorma Taccone in a furry suit). So far, the elements loosely match up with the original series. Most of the updates involve more vulgarity. Cha-Ka is a randy monkey who takes every opportunity to grab Holly's breasts and even Professor Marshall's crotch. Marshall covers himself in dinosaur pee as a camouflage and gets an epic hickey from a football-sized mosquito.

Land of the Lost is one of those films so caught up in its concept it has forgotten its audience. The campy parody, including a time-travelling gadget that plays snippets of the soundtrack from A Chorus Line , are unlikely to mean anything to the kids, and the dinosaur poop jokes are wasted on adults.

Director Brad Silberling ( Casper , Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unforunate Events ) throws around special effects that do nothing to advance the story - antic scenes of raptors tearing up an ice-cream truck or a clumsy parody of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds in a pterodactyl nest - and run contrary to Ferrell's strengths as an off-the-cuff improviser.

Like Steve Carell's Evan Almighty , it's a bad match of studio bloat and intimate comic lead. At best, Land of the Lost leaves space for Ferrell and McBride to riff semi-amusingly as McBride cocks a skeptical eye-brow while Ferrell puffs and pouts, displays his hairy belly and offers nonsensical ejaculations ("Captain Kirk's nipples!").

Give Ferrell credit for a certain kind of comic genius - he's worked in higher-profile pictures with bigger paydays - but there's a worrisome pattern of devolution here. Compared to his two starring films from last year, Step Brothers and Semi-Pro , the previous entry, Blades of Glory , looks respectable. Before that, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby , was better, and going back five years, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy , may be his masterpiece.

If it weren't for the welcome anomaly of his Stranger than Fiction (2006), you get a depressing suspicion he's modelling his career on Chevy Chase.