Walking out of Land of the Lost, a man turned to his family and said, “That was the best movie I’ve ever seen.” He walked about 15 more feet through the lobby and then turned to say it again. Apparently, it was worth repeating. Not to ridicule this poor guy or the nameless encounter he allowed the rest of the lobby to witness, but he is the core audience for Land of the Lost: people who have little to no expectations for film coherency, people who are just thrilled to be out of the house experiencing a trip to the theater, people who prefer volume over content.
Nothing wrong with those things, but they nearly render me incapable of reviewing Land of the Lost, which I think is stupid on a level that can’t even be appreciated in that stupidly awesome way some bad movies aspire to.
As a mini review inside my review, here’s an unbiased summation of the film: It stars Will Ferrell. It’s a comedy. High-velocity things happen inside high-volume stunts. Special effects render tyrannosaurs, lizard men and giant crabs into engaging adversaries. The jokes sample from physical gags and bathroom humor (Dino urine! Dino farts! Dino burps!) to supreme irony and over-the-top parody. A love interest develops that ends happily. The movie doesn’t really transition from scene to scene in any coherent way, so there’s actually more room for action, special effects and laugh-out-loud jokes. And in the end, there’s a possibility for a sequel.
If you think you might like Land of the Lost then stop reading, because the biased review will commence from here on.
For starters … Will Ferrell. The comedian phoned this one in, and from payphone at some dumpy corner store, too. He plays Dr. Rick Marshall, a quantum paleontologist who develops a proton pack that rips a hole in the space-time continuum. Marshall is sucked into this land of the lost, which acts as a hub for all time — “Is that a Cessna crashed in a viking ship?” Yes, indeed. And there are dinosaurs, cavemen, lizard people and two varieties of fruit (bug-filled fruit and narcotic “White Rabbit” fruit). Ferrell, who still thinks his presence alone is comedy gold, provides one of the most uneven performances of his career: he’s a science genius, bumbling fool, arrogant jerk, raging nerd and a failing hack, but never any of them at the same time. Every time he appears on the screen he’s someone new, as if the scenes required nothing but his current mood during that particular day of shooting. He spends a great deal of time fleeing from a T-Rex that can run about five times faster than humans, but can never seem to catch any of them. Later the dinosaur swallows, digests and excretes Marshall. Thankfully, the excreting takes place off screen, although, an earlier scene of Marshall dousing himself in dino urine to hide his scent is not.
One line, that deserves its own paragraph, is uncomfortably cruel: “Forget the Polish, it’s the tyrannosaurs that are the real dummies.” In a family comedy? Really?Talk about overkill on the jokes, this clunker kicks dead horses out of sheer desperation. The urine gag goes on forever, as does a food-binging joke early in the film — Ferrell, in a creative stupor, eats like 12 meals … haha. Then there’s Chaka, the ape-like missing link that turns up and never leaves. Vast portions of the dialogue are spent translating his lost language, which always ends with the mispronunciation of a key word (“Chorizo tacos … I love those”). Chaka, I’ve since been told, was in the original Land of the Lost TV show, so his presence was required, but never wanted.
The main female character (played by Anna Friel) was written into the script to be groped repeatedly. See, Chaka communicates by grabbing women’s breasts. Later, just because, she tears her pants into little booty shorts. I hate it when movies make me feel like a feminist, but come on — most women just do porn when they want to be degraded. It may not apply here, but this quote from HBO's Flight of the Conchords came to mind: "She's so hot she's making me sexist … bitch."
The only highlight in this slag heap of film is Danny McBride, whose been the funniest thing in everything he’s touched going as far back as 2003’s All the Real Girls, his first film. He does this cocky, shoot-from-the-hip brand of honesty that’s refreshingly pure in a film this outlandishly overblown. McBride on the dinosaur jungle: “I betcha someone is growing weed up in here.” McBride on life: “Never trust a dude in a tunic. Ever.” McBride on bathroom humor: “You were deuced out by dinosaur?! Too cool.” Some movies are bad in good ways. Some are good in bad ways. Then there’s Land of the Lost, which is bad in a bad way. Sadly, it seems proud of this.
