Land of the Lost is not a movie that I wanted to see. All promotional material related to it seems to scream "ironic humor," something we aren't supposed to believe, even on a fictional level, and something that is going to try to get by purely on "Please laugh at the purposefully cheesy plot and special effects that we did" humor. This style naturally keeps people from becoming involved in the film, an important quality even for comedies. Also, I just can't take much Will Ferrell with my cinema. My personal feelings aside, I went into this film, as I do all films (as I do everything, I guess) hoping I would end up liking it. Not only did I not like this film, not only did I personally end up hating this movie pretty intensely, but I can also objectively say that its childish jokes and wavering script make it downright bad.

Paleontologist Dr. Will Marshall (Will Ferrell) has decided that sideways time travel holds the key to the survival of the human race, and he has invented a tachyon amplifier to make such travel possible. When he and an admirer of his work, Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel), test it out, they, along with a fireworks-selling river ride tour guide, Will Stanton (Danny McBride), are sucked into a desolate point on Earth at which all times have converged. Viking ships, UFOs, and gas station signs stick out of the desert. Dinosaurs, apelike cavemen, and alien creatures called sleestaks live here. Dr. Marshall and company have to find his tachyon amplifier, which was lost when they got sucked through time, so that they can get back to the present.

Nothing goes right the whole time. I'm referring to the film itself, not the events presented to its characters, though that is also true. One huge flaw is the indecision contained in the script, which is at times exceedingly juvenile and at others slightly too racy for the children that many of the jokes are aimed at. One second we're watching Dr. Marshall get mocked by elementary school kids; the next we're seeing a guy try to sell boob coffee mugs to him. One moment Marshall and Stanton are playing with a vibrating crystal that makes their voices sound funny; the next, Stanton is telling Cantrell she should sit on it. There is a tyrannosaurus that gets angry because Marshall talks about how stupid T-Rexes are, and there is a gag in which the characters grab Cantrell's breasts while trying to communicate with a pre-human. There's nothing straight-up obscene, here, and it's not going to corrupt the youth of America, but I know there are plenty of parents who would be uneasy about their children seeing some of these things.

Making matters worse is the fact that none of this is funny to begin with, unless, perhaps, you're a child. In fact, much of the humor is painful. In the aforementioned scene in which the characters touch the crystal that makes their voices sound weird, they begin singing Cher's "Life After Love." Later, Ferrell ties his shirt up and ballet-dances through a volcano-nest of pterodactyl eggs to get his tachyon amplifier, a scene that results in all the characters singing a cheesy show tune as a lullaby to keep the baby pterodactyls asleep. Other jokes consist of things like Marshall's suspicious eagerness to douse himself in dinosaur urine in order to disguise his scent, as well as his discussing how serene of an experience it was collecting the urine in the first place.

Ferrell consistently comes across like he's trying to be funny, his tone always conveying a sense of over-seriousness, which is supposed to enhance the ridiculous things he says but that is often exaggerated so much as only to belie his desire to make people laugh at him. Case in point: in his opening scene, he is bested humor-wise by Matt Lauer, who plays it totally straight. Soon after, the questions the elementary kids ask him, like whether dinosaurs have boobs, are much funnier than his ironic-serious preaching about the importance of tachyons and time travel. Despite my personal preferences, I know that Will Ferrell is a talented man. Many people find him hilarious, including my comedy hero, Conan O'Brien. But in this movie, he's just off.

The other two main characters' acting feels actually quite natural, which is good, but there are caveats here. Friel's character is the voice of reason throughout the movie, which, in this film, essentially makes her boring. McBride, too, delivers his lines with conviction, but his dialogue problem is worse than boredom. Practically everything about the character seems modeled after Larry the Cable Guy. In fact, most of his lines make Larry the Cable Guy look funny, like when he sees the pre-human and declares his happiness because he's always wanted to see Big Foot. The jokes are simply dumb.

The special effects are the film's final flaw. Some of them are adequate, such as the T-Rex. Others are purposefully clumsy, such as the ape-man and the sleestak aliens. The former looks like an ape with a human's face stitched on, and the latter look like exactly what they really are: people in non-emotive rubber suits (in fact, they appear to be using the same suits used by the 1970s Land of the Lost television show). There is one point at which two sleestaks shed their skin, and Marshall and Stanton put them on to blend in. This scene does not feel the least bit surprising or gross because we don't see two humans wearing alien skin; we see two humans wearing alien costumes (and they're never discovered until they speak up, despite the fact that their faces are fully visible through cut-out giant eyeball holes). Ultimately, the film's blatant, acknowledged artificiality makes it more of a mocking parody of the TV series Land of the Lost than a comedic film adaptation of it.

I was expecting this movie to be mediocre, and it was worse. It doesn't know who its audience is, and it does nothing to please whoever that audience might be. No matter how you look at it, this movie is not funny. The self-acknowledgment of the bad special effects does not elevate them to humor, and Ferrell's overacting, which can be seen as self-acknowledged as well, only inflates the juvenile nature of the humor given him by the writers. Even things like aliens and dinosaurs are rendered bland by the overpowering lameness of the script. This is an overblown mess of bad jokes and ridiculous situations, made none the better by the fact that the writers clearly realize how stupid it all is.