You can call it updating or re-imagining or anything else you want, but the new Brad Silberling take on the Sid and Marty Kroft classic Land of the Lost is, at its core, lost. That’s the plain and simple truth of the matter.
Silberling gives us a character named Rick Marshall (Will Ferrell) who is a crackpot scientist known more for beefing with The Today Show’s Matt Lauer (playing himself) than for anything resembling scientific achievement (making him a media creation on par with Octomom). We also get versions of Holly (Anna Friel) and Will (Danny McBride), but instead of them being Marshall’s children they’re adult foils for Ferrell’s Marshall.
Friel’s Holly is a Ph.D. candidate who actually believes in Marshall’s kooky ideas about alternative universes (and along the way becomes his romantic interest), while McBride’s Will is a rednecky goof who gets to improvise wildly with Ferrell/Marshall during their journey in the alt-world of the Sleestaks and the dinosaurs.
And it is here that aimlessness of the story takes complete hold.
Ferrell and McBride are given far too much room to attempt some sort of post-bop comedic jazz romp, but nothing is daring enough to approach the avant-garde realm of, say, The Hangover’s Zach Galifianakis. These two are just tweeting atonally to a classic refrain that should have remained untouched. The Kroft original didn’t need updating because it was all about simplicity and its own brand of low-fi charm. What’s truly Lost here is the brilliant swing of Ferrell’s career. Grade: D-
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2009.