Land Of The Lost: MSN Review

On the one hand it has all the ingredients of a family friendly popcorn blockbuster – dinosaurs, aliens, alternate dimensions and so on. But at the same time it claims to be a snarky re-imagining of an old-school TV favourite, much in the style of The Brady Bunch Movie or Starsky and Hutch. And finally there is that mysterious Will Ferrell factor: the curly comedian brings his brand of deadpan surrealism to whatever he appears in, whether it fits or not, and Land Of The Lost is no exception.

 

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Cackling wildly in his hilltop laboratory, director Brad Silberling sews all these disparate bits together, runs some lightning through the resulting mess and  hey presto: the movie’s alive!  Well, kinda. It can stumble around the place and growl a bit, but you wouldn’t want to invite it to a cocktail party.

It goes like this: Ferrell is your basic mad scientist, ridiculed by his peers for his research into a parallel universe where all time periods meet. The movie spends a meagre fifteen minutes contriving to maroon him in this mysterious dimension with a perky young researcher played by Anna Friel and a sex obsessed redneck (Danny McBride). The minute our heroes are through the space time vortex, the plot stops dead and the movie becomes an over-budgeted sketch show.

The land of the lost itself is essentially a theme park, with alien infested jungles nudging up against desert wastes and rumbling volcanoes. Our party’s guide is Chaka, a Neanderthal monkey-man who spends his time playfully grabbing Anna Friel’s breasts. Most of the jokes bob around this level of wit and sophistication; at one point Ferrell merrily douses himself in dinosaur urine.

It’s hard to know exactly who Land of the Lost is aimed at. The tone is too smutty for children, the action sequences are too low key to get the pulse pounding, and diehard Ferrell fans will find only a few glimpses of the nuttiness that made Talladega Nights and Anchorman such fun. There’s a nice running gag about a oversensitive T Rex, and a genuinely bizarre drug sequence, but the big comedy moments – vampire mosquitoes, giant crabs, rubber suited aliens – have an underlying nastiness that’s more creepy and sarcastic than actually funny.

An awkward, mixed-up mess with a severe shortage of laughs and thrills. And be warned, Ferrell gets his shirt off again.

 

 

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