The Lost Plot

Family/Sci-Fi/Action/Comedy/Romance. Will Ferrell, Anna Friel, Danny McBride, Jorma Taccone, John Boylan. Director: Brad Silberling.

Screenwriters Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas have lost their sense of humour in this lamentable reworking of the kitsch 1970s television series about a family flung back in time.

Retooled as a big-budget showcase for Will Ferrell’s peculiar brand of tomfoolery, Land Of The Lost is about as much fun as a close encounter with a steaming pile of Tyrannosaur excrement.

The entire budget of Brad Silberling’s film – rumoured to be £60m – has been wasted on a menagerie of prehistoric, computer-animated critters and the leading man’s bloated salary.

The script and supporting performances, particularly a woefully miscast Anna Friel as a plummy British explorer, are all bargain basement.

Verbal non sequiturs (“Captain Kirk's nipples!”) fail to raise a smile let alone a chuckle as the haphazard plot lurches from one bizarre interlude to the next – such as one impromptu singalong to Believe by Cher. The hero of this sorry tale is Dr Rick Marshall (Ferrell), who becomes the laughing stock of the scientific community for his outlandish theories on time-warps in his book My Other Car Is A Time Machine.

He loses funding and is reduced to ‘inspiring’ visitors at a museum where he meets Cambridge graduate Holly Cantrell (Friel).

She shares an exciting archaeological find: a fossilised imprint of a cigarette lighter – an anomaly explained by Rick’s wild suppositions.

The pair venture to the site of the find – the rundown Devil's Cave tourist attraction – in the company of guide Will Stanton (McBride).

A couple of minutes into the water ride, Rick’s self-constructed tachyon particle amplifier creates a fissure in space and time and the three adventurers are sucked into a parallel universe ruled by dinosaurs.

The human interlopers quickly befriend a caveman called Cha-Ka (Taccone) and fall foul of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which they nickname Grumpy.

Rick, Holly and Will discover that a carnivorous race of creatures called Sleestaks is plotting an invasion of Earth, so they join forces with rebel alien Enik (Boylan) to avert the threat to mankind’s existence.

Land Of The Lost is a deeply unsatisfying mish-mash of comedy and action that relies on the special effects team to paper over gaping holes in the script.

Running jokes never get out of the starting blocks, like the tachyon amplifier which, inexplicably, plays snippets from the musical A Chorus Line.

“I love show tunes. They tell the story of the human condition,” explains Rick. “It’s a bit gay,” replies Holly.

While Ferrell mugs to camera, Friel suffers the indignity of having her breasts groped by her co-stars, supposedly for laughs. Hilarious.

Audiences who make the grave error of paying to see this film will, if they are lucky, quickly drift into the Land Of Nod.