Land of the Lost II

I haven't seen the Land of the Lost movie and I don't intend to so I can't offer a review of it. What I can do is review why I don't want to see it. I'm not alone in this. The movie is a major flop. It cost something like $200 million to produce and promote (IMDB gives $100 million but does not include marketing) but it only took in $18 million on its opening weekend.

Some movie ideas are so stupid that you wonder how anyone ever thought that people would watch them. The Jack Black/Green Lantern is one of these. Mercifully, it never got beyond the talking phase.

Land of the Lost can best be described as a Bizarro-world version of the TV show. The TV show was a serious drama aimed at kids (although adults could appreciate the science-fiction concepts). It was centered around a family of a father and his two kids. It was produced on a shoe-string budget. Top science fiction writers worked on it. The kids acted like kids and the animals acted like animals.

In contrast, the movie is a crude PG-13 comedy. It revolves around three unrelated adults. According to several review, the plot is mainly a bunch of comedy sketches strung together. There are no kids and the animals act like whatever the comedy bit requires.

So who was the audience for this thing? Fans of the original will not find much to like. Will Farrell fans who were not into the show are probably wondering why he did this?

This is not Farrell's first problem with translating 1960s and 1970s material. Bewitched and The Producers both bombed. The Producers was actually pretty good but Bewitched wasted both Farrell and Nichole Kidman in a script that couldn't make up its mind what it wanted to be.