Land Of The Lost deserved to be a flop. Its a remake of a not particularly loved, nonsensical kids TV show which no-one was demanding to be remade. However if they were demanding it to be remade, perhaps they wouldn’t want the general premise of the show changed to fit the whims of a big US comedian who appears to want to just be silly for an hour and a half. Thus robbed of any form of structure or point, the film flounders from one half arsed set piece to the next to add puerile jokes and waste a huge amount of money on comic CGI for a non-existent audience.
I loved it. Well, not loved. But the hour and a half I spent with Will Ferrell, Anna Friel and Danny McBride actually passed with very little boredom and a few laughs. Its Will Ferrell: you are paying for stupid. Perhaps the huge amount sent of set design, and a CGI dinosaur with attitude was wasted (from its Box Office it probably was), but for a daft join the dots bit of comedy adventure Land Of The Lost is a lot more inventive than it second hand nature would suggest. An overblown pole vault joke becomes one of the strangest plot points I have ever seen, and there is just enough empathy for the characters to make you actually care about what happens to them (something that didn’t happen in GI Joe). But Will Ferrell was due a flop (another flop?) and this is a tough film to market, it being basically aimed at people who like overblown action films AND Anchorman. So me then. And whilst its not a groundbreaking flop like Speed Racer, it is a good natured piece of tomfoolery which won;t look anywhere near as good on DVD, where everyone will see it.