Land of the Lost
Movie Review
Land of the Lost
by Eric D. Snider
Grade: B
Released: June 5, 2009
Directed by:
Cast:
Oh, what a weird movie this is. "Land of the Lost" was a fairly strange TV show to begin with, and now the movie version has kept all of the built-in goofiness -- the slow-moving reptilian Sleestaks, the race of monkey people, the dinosaurs -- and added more. It's a sci-fi/fantasy comedy full of special effects, yet it also has Will Ferrell and Danny McBride doing their patented semi-improvised idiot banter. It was directed by Brad Silberling, who also made "City of Angels" and "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events." It co-stars Anna Friel, from "Pushing Daisies," who it turns out is British. It has a scene where the guys get high on some kind of primitive narcotic, then eat a giant crab that wanders past, complete with a giant lemon wedge. What the...?
Naturally, if you don't usually find Ferrell or McBride funny, this will not change your mind. Purists who love the original TV series might be upset, too, although I would gently suggest that if you believe "Land of the Lost" deserves reverence then you ought to reexamine your priorities. For the rest of us, this is a wildly bizarre and frequently hilarious adventure that appears to be whacked-out by design, not out of sloppiness.
Ferrell plays Dr. Rick Marshall, a "quantum paleontologist" whose book, "My Other Car Is a Time Machine," has made him a laughingstock in the scientific community. He believes that with a device he's been working on, a tachyon amplifier, he can open a portal to time travel and parallel universes. Consequently, he's now stuck doing tours at the La Brea Tar Pits and sublimating his feelings of inadequacy by going on eating binges. (One of his concoctions: a doughnut stuffed with M&M's. "That way, when you're done with the doughnut, you don't have to eat any M&M's." So it's a time-saving device, really.)
On the TV show, Rick Marshall was transported back in time with Will and Holly, who were his teenage children. This time, Holly (Anna Friel) is a grad student who was expelled from Cambridge for advocating Marshall's crazy theories, and Will (Danny McBride) is a redneck souvenir-peddler at a cave-turned-tourist-attraction in the California desert. It is while paddling a raft through the cave that Marshall, Will, and Holly are caught in the greatest earthquake ever known and sent to the "land of the lost," an amalgam of dinosaurs, early primates, strange reptiles, and other out-of-place artifacts.
They are befriended by Chaka (Jorma Taccone), a monkey-like fellow whose language Holly can somehow translate (and speak!). Chaka likes Holly but finds Marshall off-putting. (He wants Chaka, who can scarcely enunciate anything in English, to call him "Dr. Rick Marshall.") Amusingly, Chaka and Holly are the voices of reason in this enterprise, while Marshall and Will are the voices of masculine arrogance and idiocy as the three humans try to find a way back to their own time. Marshall thinks his Ph.D. means any idea he has is brilliant; Will thinks fireworks and machismo are all you need; they're both morons.
McBride partly owes his career to Ferrell, who helped champion his indie project "The Foot Fist Way" a couple years ago, but this is the first time they've actually appeared in a movie together. They're opposite sides of the same coin. Ferrell excels at characters who believe they are smart but lack common sense and are prone to short-tempered petulance; McBride tends to play men who know they're ignorant and are proud of it, often belligerently so. Ferrell's version of George W. Bush was basically a combination of the two types, which probably explains why Ferrell and McBride get along so well, and why their comic interaction feels like they've been working together for years, not months. Friel, for her part, is a good foil and straightman, and Taccone, under all that Chaka makeup, almost steals the show.
The screenplay, by Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas, whose separate TV credits include "Entourage" and "Saturday Night Live," gives everyone plenty of room to play around -- maybe too much, in fact. The aforementioned drug-trip scene, while perfectly hilarious, is marred by the nagging feeling that it's only there to kill time. The film is barely 90 minutes, and the actual story -- which doesn't even try to make sense -- doesn't come close to filling it. Then again, the sequence does typify why the movie works: Even when you're sober, the movie makes you feel like you must be high.
Grade: B
Rated PG-13, a lot of vulgarity and some sexual dialogue, moderate profanity
1 hr., 33 min.
Copyright © Eric D. Snider.
This work may not be transmitted via the Internet, nor reproduced in any other way, without written consent from Eric D. Snider.
This item has 16 comments
June 5, 2009 at 9:47 am
Please. Anna Friel is English, not British. To be precise, she is Mancunian.
Calling an English person British is like calling a Scot British, or a Canadian American. It's just not right!
June 5, 2009 at 11:09 am
I agree that Anna Friel is Mancunian (from Manchester) and English (from England), but why doesn't that make her (or a Scot) British? England and Scotland are both part of Great Britain and the British Isles. Please explain this to me if my reasoning is wrong, as I have tried to get all this straight for a long time.
Most of my understanding of this comes from the Wikipedia article, so I'd love to know if they got it right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminology_of_the_British_Isles
June 5, 2009 at 11:17 am
And actually, Anna Friel is Greater Mancunian, given that she's from Rochdale and not Manchester proper.
June 5, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Mancunian? Funny, she doesn't look chinese.
June 5, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Whatever you want to call her, she's great in this movie! It wasn't as funny as I'd hoped it'd be, & deserves the B. Will Ferrell is silly, but it's really Chaka that steals the show!
June 5, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Manchester is in Britain. That makes her British.
June 8, 2009 at 11:02 am
Manchester is in England, which makes her English. England is in Britain, which still makes her English.
And yes, England, N. Ireland, Scotland and Wales make up Great Britain, but if someone said to you "Dwi Cymraeg" in a thick Welsh accent would you really say to them, "Oh, so you're British!" I doubt it. I find that it is generally only English people who are referred to as British.
Our cultural identities are linked to our countries, and I don't anyone who would thank you for calling them British.
June 8, 2009 at 11:54 am
I'd thank you for calling me British
June 13, 2009 at 6:16 pm
"I find that it is generally only English people who are referred to as British."
Uh, and the actress in question is English, no? So why is British a problem?
I agree that calling someone British when they're from North Ireland, Scotland, or Wales is probably a bit insensitive, but England?
If you can't call someone from any of those places British, who *is* British???
June 15, 2009 at 6:33 am
If you are referring to us as a whole, then British is quite correct. If you are referring to us individually, then it is correct to refer to us by our country, i.e. English, Welsh, etc. In other words, "the British are a great people" would be a correct sentence. "That person is British" would be an incorrect sentence.
@ Russ: "'I find that it is generally only English people who are referred to as British.'
Uh, and the actress in question is English, no?"
Precisely. She is English, not British. Why repeat what I just said? Also, why would you think it is insensitive to refer to the Irish, Scotch and Welsh as British, but not the English? That is just stupid.
June 16, 2009 at 1:04 pm
The Time magazine review (June 15) refers to Friel's character as British.
June 17, 2009 at 4:17 am
[sarcasm]
'The Time', you say? Oh, well, in that case all is right with the world. It has certainly been proven many times that popular media can NEVER be wrong, hasn't it.
[/sarcasm]
June 17, 2009 at 10:57 am
Wow, calm down. I didn't even say Time magazine was right. I just said they did it, too.
And though the sentence is admittedly awkward, I didn't call the magazine "The Time". The 'the' referred to 'Time magazine review,' and the first clause could have been restated thus: "The review in Time magazine...."
June 17, 2009 at 11:44 am
Lulu: Quit being an a-hole.
Amp: There was nothing wrong with your sentence. It's not even awkward. The only way to think you were calling the magazine "The Time" would be to completely misread the sentence. However, if Time called Friel's character British, that's different from what I did, which was call the actress British.
Lulu: Again, quit being an a-hole. I am sensitive to the idea of calling people whatever they prefer to be called, but so far no one other than you has strenuously objected to people from England being referred to as "British." The Associated Press Stylebook allows "British" as a general term for someone who is specifically from England, Scotland, or Wales. "British" is not as specific as I could have been, but it's not wrong, either.
June 18, 2009 at 4:31 am
Eric really got this review right. I thought this movie was really good! I almost didn't go see it since most of the reviews were so bad. I usually trust Eric and he rarely fails me-lol.
June 18, 2009 at 10:51 am
I will go see this movie because of Danny McBride, Jorma Taccone, and Eric Snider's review. Not for Will Farrell.