Honolulu Weekly

Judging by its opening box office weekend take, nobody expected much from Land of the Lost and so audiences ignored it. Who can blame them really? It’s yet another celebrity-vehicle based on a semi-cult, children’s TV program, plus it stars one of our most dependable (and taken for granted) dumb-guys Will Ferrell. Perhaps the monster hit Night at the Museum sequel may have sucked up the extra box office dollars from the wallets of all the man-child aficionados of the world. The Blades of Glory/Semi-Pro/Step Brothers triage probably helped dilute the waters as well.

Ferrell plays Dr. Rick Marshall, a scientist convinced that the energy crisis can be solved by obtaining fossil fuels from parallel dimensions. Matt Lauer ridicules him on The Today Show and his career is over. One day, pretty Cambridge scientist Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel) comes by with an ancient fossilized rock embedded with the outline of a very modern Zippo lighter—Marshall’s lighter. Using a “tachyon energy converter,” the two trek to a portal in a deserted desert amusement attraction run by the redneck of all hicks, Will Stanton (played by the hilariously loathsome and foul Danny McBride). The portal opens and the trio is stuck in a prehistoric land of the lost.

What the movie gets right is not giving undeserved reverence to its source material—a television show that wasn’t exactly the most beloved of kids programs—making the movie ripe for revisionism without much in the way of fan-monitoring and criticism. And revise they do. The tone is just wackily bent and bizarre, from Ferrell’s one-liners (“Captain Kirk’s nipples!”) to the use of a song from A Chorus Line as a homing beacon inside the tachyon machine. When the two male leads find themselves singing “Believe” by Cher, a viewer can no longer question the reasoning behind the warbling but only chuckle and go with the flow.

Special effects here are used not only with the right amount of wow-factor, but also with genuine comic inspiration. We get giant crabs that end up as a Red Lobster feast while Ferrell and McBride trip on prehistoric love juice. A Jurassic mosquito sucks an abnormal amount of blood from one of the characters. Best of all is the T-Rex. While the creature itself is nothing we haven’t seen before each summer blockbuster season, the big lug is given a genuine running gag. The dinosaur develops a grudge-match with our intrepid scientist and a tyrannosaurus has never cocked his head quite so smugly or been reduced to playing a straight man before. It’s no wonder that the characters name him “Grouchy.”

The human performers are just as entertaining. This is Ferrell’s most restrained role in years—if dumping reptile urine over himself, parading a monster insect bite on his bare back, and telling Matt Lauer to “suck it,” can be described as restrained. It’s strangely refreshing to see him actually playing a part, as opposed to an expanded, unused SNL sketch. The actor is wisely not the only talented comedian cast in this film though.

The British-accented voice of reason comes from Anna Friel, so appealing in the now-cancelled Pushing Daisies and here, she proves her comic timing can both translate to the big screen as well as hold up against heavyweight comics. Speaking of which, Danny McBride, the white-trash secret weapon in smaller roles in Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, and Observe and Report, as well as star of his own gloriously vulgar HBO series Eastbound and Down, has a genuine supporting role in Land and he and his sleeveless denim shirt run with the unleashed opportunity for complete, ribald crassness.

Michael Giacchino provides yet another gripping score, skillfully avoiding repeat work from his other stranded-people compositions (with the similar title, Lost). This one is a canny play on his prehistoric-end credits sequence in Cloverfield. Lumped with his work in Star Trek and Up, he’s the MVP composer of the summer.

Land of the Lost provides everything it was supposed to, and a little bit more, which is exactly what we ask of our summer blockbusters. It may end up being the overlooked gem of the season.