The DOA, special effects-driven comedy-adventure Land of the Lost goes nowhere in a hurry, running out of gas by the end of the first reel and landing at our feet with a dull thud, like a dead dinosaur that's lost its will to live.
The initial version was a kitschy TV sci-fi series that ran for three years in the 1970s. The big-screen adaptation of the original concept by puppeteer brothers Sid and Marty Krofft (two of the film's producers) is about a disgraced paleontologist whose scientific theories have been publicly mocked by his detractors.
He's Rick Marshall, played by Will Ferrell, who, along with two sidekicks (in the TV series, it was his two kids) -- redneck survivalist and "souvenirist" Will (Danny McBride) and research assistant Holly (Anna Friel) -- is sucked into a vortex and accidentally transported to an alternate universe on the space-time continuum.
It's a realm ruled by dinosaurs, monkey-men called Pakuni (including Chaka, the annoying chattering monkey-boy played by Jorma Taccone), and... wait for it, steadfast fans with good memories... Sleestak, villainous lizard-like creatures with huge eyes and one horn!
Although director Brad Silberling (Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Casper, Moonlight Mile, City of Angels) had digital dinosaurs at his disposal, in contrast to the stop-motion creatures on the tube thirty years ago, he has tried to keep the film as handmade as possible.
Thus the large, physically constructed sets that dwarf the actors who are actually on those sets. Thus the performer-in-latex-suits approach to creature creating. And thus the feel of a thrown-together entertainment performed on the last day of summer camp by the kids in the underachieving bunk.
As for the meandering, first-draft-quality script by TV writers Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas, with its wafer-thin plot, it plays like a half-baked "Saturday Night Live" sketch that's been stretched well beyond its breaking point.
The screenplay takes what started out as campy adventure material and takes it in a much more generically comedic direction. At least, that's the intent.
But this slapdash comedy is monumentally unfunny. There are more laughs in the bookend scenes that open and close the picture (involving Matt Lauer in a cameo appearance as himself) than in the entire body of the film.
Will Ferrell's persona and brand of humor, it turns out, doesn't mesh all that well with the cheesy material, aimed at an undiscerning audience, with much of the humor much too blue for what is supposed to be a kidflick.
And the can-you-top-this ad-libbing that Ferrell and McBride are obviously doing seems not a calculated act of invention but a misguided act of desperation. Only Friel emerges with her dignity somewhat intact.
This wrongheaded idea for a large-scale hybrid of a movie for the family audience, coupled with astonishingly clueless execution, is a recipe for disaster. And Land of the Lost is nothing less.
So we'll lose 1 star out of 4. This shapeless, feckless, and pretty much laughless critter fritter can be found in the land of lost laughs.
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It's a realm ruled by dinosaurs, monkey-men called Pakuni (including Chaka, the annoying chattering monkey-boy played by Jorma Taccone), and... wait for it, steadfast fans with good memories... Sleestak, villainous lizard-like creatures with huge eyes and one horn! 
