Movie comedy usually benefits from a certain confidence, even swagger; it means someone knows where the jokes are and how to tell them.
One of the first noticeable things about “Land of the Lost” is its uncertainty. A Will Ferrell comedy based on a 1970s TV show, this movie is defined by its rating: PG-13. It’s not geared for children, despite the subject matter, but it’s too tame for Ferrell’s R-rated following.
“Land of the Lost” casts Ferrell as Rick Marshall, a fatuous scientist whose “time warp” theory is ridiculed by everybody in his profession, except a doctoral student, Holly (British actress Anna Friel).
They trek to a tourist trap in the desert that might just be a portal in time. Sure enough, when Marshall flips the switch on his homemade gizmo, a crack opens up. Also, a tune from “A Chorus Line” plays, because of a loose wire in the gizmo.
Which is how Marshall and Holly travel to a desert locale, along with the cheeseball owner of the tourist trap, Will (Danny McBride). Here there are dinosaurs, and monkey people who apparently represent a missing evolutionary link, and random cultural garbage.
The main preoccupation is the dinosaurs — or not being eaten by them, to be precise. (Although even the rules about this are vague: sometimes the humans flee for their lives, sometimes they calmly walk around the T-Rex.) This almost disguises the fact that there is no story line to speak of.
This is yet another comedy for which the studio seems to have taken it on faith that if you plunk Will Ferrell in front of the camera, amusing things will happen, even if the jokes aren’t written on the page.
Ferrell is a very funny human being, but even he needs a script. You can hear the unmistakable sound of him trying to summon up the comedy gods in improvised lines or goofy line readings, but even the good ones vanish into the airless, computer-generated special-effects world of the movie.
Same with Danny McBride, that sometimes explosively funny guy from “Pineapple Express” and “The Foot Fist Way.” He and Ferrell only hit a groove a couple of times.
Director Brad Silberling, whose previous work has tended toward the weepy, is clearly miscast as the director of a dino-sized comedy.
This movie is stuck in idle from the earliest moments, and nothing, not even “A Chorus Line,” can save it.
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