Searching For A Ferrell In A Sleestak

Land of the Lost takes place in an alternate dimension, a strange land where the past, the present, and the future all converge, and where the desert landscape is dotted with random junk from our world half-buried in the sand: a roadside motel, a Ferris wheel, an ice cream truck, a stretch limousine. Dinosaurs roam the land, pterodactyls patrol the sky, while villages of ape creatures and lizard men try not to get eaten. It’s basically a gigantic pop-cultural dumping ground... not unlike the neighbourhood multiplex during blockbuster season, where all the ephemera of the last four decades — from Star Trek to Transformers to X-Men to G.I. Joe, all of which we’d thought we’d seen the last of — falls out of the sky and plops onto the movie screens before us. And like the characters in Land of the Lost, we don’t need to spend much time in this world before we start wishing we’d just stayed at home.

Will Ferrell plays Dr. Rick Marshall, a blowhard paleontologist whose theory that time warps can solve the world’s energy crisis (set forth in his book My Other Car Is a Time Machine) has made him the laughingstock of the science world. But cute young British scientist Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel from Pushing Daisies) believes he’s a misunderstood genius, and with her encouragement, Marshall finally finishes assembling his “tachyon amplifier” and heads out into the desert to test it out. It works too well, propelling Marshall, Holly, and the redneck proprietor of a nearby tourist trap (Danny McBride) into an alternate dimension with no clear way of getting back home.

Land of the Lost zooms through its setup so hurriedly that you assume there must be some amazing adventures ahead which the filmmakers just can’t wait to get to. If anything, though, the plotting gets even slacker once the heroes arrive at the other end of that transdimensional portal, and it’s hard to tell if the lazy screenwriting is intended as an homage to Sid and Marty Krofft’s original 1970s kiddie TV show or if screenwriters Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas arrived at that approach all on their own.

Rick Marshall barely even qualifies as a character; he’s more like a script hole that everyone was hoping Ferrell would fill with ad libs. Now, I’m a longtime Will Ferrell apologist — aggressively silly-stupid comedy, passionately committed to, sneaks past my defences every time — but even I have to admit that Ferrell’s performance here lacks that glint of bull-headed insanity that characterizes his best work. The one glimpse Land of the Lost gives us of that classic Ferrell persona — the kind of man who can insist with absolute certainty that “San Diego” is Spanish for “a whale’s vagina” — comes in a bit where Marshall comes up with a plan to make himself invisible to the tyrannosaurus rex that’s been chasing them by dumping a gallon of dinosaur urine over his head. It’s such a witless gag, which only made me root harder for Ferrell as he tried to make it work — and you know what? When he complained that the urine was making his eyes burn and tried to solve the problem by dumping even more urine over himself, thereby making the pain even worse, I couldn’t help myself. I had to laugh.

But I didn’t laugh long. And I didn’t laugh again. Not even when Ferrell got swallowed by a dinosaur and was pooped out the other end. Hey — I have my standards.