MOVIE REVIEW

The familiar prehistoric landscape is back as are the characters from the '70s TV series. But it struggles to keep adults and kids entertained.

By BETSY SHARKEY, Film Critic

"Land of the Lost" is a silly contrivance of a comedy set in a strangely surreal world populated by fast-moving T. rexes, lumbering big-eyed lizardy Sleestaks, a tribe of monkey people and a random assortment of prehistoric wildlife. There are three moons floating above and a desert below, artfully littered with half-buried remnants of important cultural artifacts: a Big Boy statue, a piece of the Bay Bridge, an ice cream truck, a motel swimming pool and a Viking ship to name a few. It's enough to make the Salvador Dali in you smile, or sigh, depending on the moment.

Spinning wildly off the '70s Saturday morning TV series of the same name, it stars Will Ferrell as Dr. Rick Marshall, a quantum paleontologist whose time warp theories have landed him in an elementary school teaching precocious kids who specialize in sarcasm.

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But before you despair that science isn't getting the respect it deserves, spunky beautiful researcher Holly (Anna Friel) slips into the classroom to encourage Dr. Rick to finish his mythic Tachyon particle accelerator. Huh? You know, the time-travel gizmo he abandoned after a really humiliating Matt Lauer grilling on "Today." But Holly has faith -- not even the legacy of the Lauer YouTube clip shakes it.

What else then would any true man of science do but dig out the machine and head to a souvenir hut in the desert run by a wisecracking redneck named Will (Danny McBride)? As fate would have it, Will also doubles as a tour guide willing to paddle them down the polluted stream that disappears into Devil's Canyon Mystery Cave, which happens to be next door.

Sure the cave looks like a papier-mâché science project, but the Tachyon readings are really high (and forgive me if I don't get all the science right). A flip of the Tachyon Meter switch and whoosh -- that stream is a rumbling river tossing them through a portal and into another world. Let the games begin.

Director Brad Silberling and screenwriters Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas have borrowed liberally and loosely from the series, grafting enough of its rock, paper, scissors design/emotional aesthetic onto "Land of the Lost" that the film will feel like a repressed memory experiment for fans of the show. The names are the same, only the identities have changed. Holly still wears braids, but she definitely doesn't think of Dr. Rick as dad. There's the "Beware of Sleestaks" whitewashed warning on a rock wall that even 30-or-so years later no one sees no matter how many times they walk past it. Monkey boy Chaka (Jorma Taccone) still speaks the screechy Pakuni developed by an actual linguist for the TV show, and the Sleestaks are still heavy breathers.

The story is a simple one: The science gang is trying to deal with another world that comes with all the confusion of different life forms, new cultural clichés and an obsession with powerful crystals. It turns out that many truisms translate -- don't trust anyone in a tunic for starters -- but that doesn't mean there won't be mountains to climb, lava beds to cross, dinosaurs to outwit and outrun on their quest to save Earth from a Sleestak invasion, or difficulty finding their way back home.

Like its characters, the film keeps getting lost too, stumbling as it struggles to keep kids and adults from squirming in their seats. There's a crowd-pleasing, clever T. rex named Grumpy fighting for screen time with a bad and long-running gag built around Chaka grabbing one of Holly's breasts every time he tries to say her name. Meanwhile, Ferrell is his likable Ferrell self, nothing new or especially exciting to report on that front.

The filmmakers get props for persuading Leonard Nimoy to suit up as the Zarn -- you know, an invisible alien creature except for the spots of light that totally make him visible. But not so much for a close-up shot of Ferrell delivering an F-bomb that seems the definition of gratuitous, which in movie lingo roughly means completely unnecessary but designed to get the boob in the back row to laugh. Mission accomplished.

betsy.sharkey@latimes.com