LAND OF THE LOST
UNIVERSAL
RELEASED 31 July 2009
Seeing as Hollywood has already exausted most well-known TV properties (Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, Scooby Doo, etc. etc.), we’re now venturing out into properties that aren’t so well-known. Personally, I’ve never seen ‘Land of the Lost’. I believe it was on Channel 4 some years ago, on a Sunday afternoon probably aimed at hungover students who would think it was good TV, in an ironic way. Anyway, it hardly set the world on fire when it aired in the 70’s. So for this big-screen version, the fimmakers have decided on a post-modern, ‘we know it’s a silly concept so we’re going to have some fun with it’ vibe. Nothing wrong with that - if the jokes had been funny...
Rick Marshall (Will Ferrell) is a joke in the scientific community. His idea that you can travel through ‘time warps’ sees him laughed off national television. Three years later, research assistant Holly (Anna Friel) insists she believes in Marshall and they take the time warp machine (which looks like a particle accelerator from ‘Ghostbusters’) into the middle of the desert and zap themselves, along with a redneck survivalist (Danny McBride) named Will, into the ‘Land of the Lost’. Once there, they encounter a pissed-off T. Rex, comically slow humanoid reptiles known as Sleestaks, and a primate called Chaka (Jorma Taccone).
The original TV series was a kids show, with Rick Marshall accompanied by his two children, Will and Holly. The movie version has decided to do away with the family aspect entirely, and this holds true for the tone of the movie. It’s clearly aimed at adults, with most of the verbal humour likely to go over kids heads. They’ll probably laugh at the occasional sight-gag. Quite why they decided to do this for a summer blockbuster, I’m not quite sure. ‘Men In Black’ showed a fantasy comedy can work for all ages, so cutting off most of your summer audience seems a strange move.
The biggest problem the movie has is it’s simply not funny. Ferrell and McBride riff off each other but it’s all too dry, and it doesn’t feel like much of a script was in place before shooting. Anna Friel, a fine actress, looks lost and out of place. By the end, jokey sequences involving pet dinosaurs and inter-dimensional aliens are incredibly boring. And if they spent something like $100 million on the movie, I can’t understand why they bothered. The movie is supposed to be intentionally cheesy, so why not go the whole hog and make it look really cheesy (and not spend very much money!) Humour doesn’t rely on the size of the budget. Something’s either funny or it isn’t - no amount of window dressing is going to change that.
TWO OUT OF FIVE