"Land of the Lost"
Directed by Brad Silberling
Rated PG-13
(One star)

One of the lesser tortures of a white-collar career is the day you get pulled into a meeting facilitated by a toothy consultant who cheerfully declares: “In this room there are no bad ideas!” And so you cringe in your Aeron ergonomic chair because you know there are, in fact, bad ideas and you’re about to hear a bunch of them.

News flash: our cheerful consultant seems to have landed a gig with the writing team for Will Ferrell’s latest film, “Land of the Lost.”

You may remember that “Land of the Lost” was a funky television show from the 1970’s that sported a pretty cool title and little else. The story revolved around a scientist who stumbles into a alternate universe populated by dinosaurs, ape-men, lizard-people and some sort of teleporting crystals.

The show was a cluttered mess of borrowed bits and pieces (including ripping off the basic concept of “Lost in Space”) most likely thrown together by overworked script writers desperate to keep the show going from week to week and as such never rose above the B-list of kid’s TV.

The notion that this show should be reincarnated as a Will Ferrell comedy is the first bad idea our consultant needs to atone for.

Ferrell plays Rick Marshall, the scientist of the story. Rick’s career is derailed after an interview with Matt Lauer, promoting his theory of time warps, disintegrates into a brawl. Lauer is a good sport but comedy is not his strong suite—a bad omen for the rest of the film.

Fast-forward a couple of years and Rick meets Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel), a graduate student who seems to be the only person who believes in his theory. She inspires Rick to build a device that amplifies Tachyon Waves, the source of time warps.

Rick and Holly head out to a run-down amusement park where Tachyon Waves are reported to be in generous supply. Sure enough, the Tachyon amplifier kicks in during one of the rides and sends Rich, Holly and the hapless ride operator, Will (Danny McBride), tumbling through a time warp. They land in a CG upgrade of the original show’s set and go about meeting the same characters that graced our TV sets in 1974: Cha-Ka the ape-boy (Jorma Taccone), Grumpy the T-Rex, and a host of lizard people called Sleestaks.

If you are of the proper age to have been a fan of the television show this reunion might mean something to you, but for the rest of us it just presents a jumble of confusing and not terribly interesting characters.

For his part, Ferrell uses this garage sale of TV sentimentality as a backdrop for an endless string of gags. And while our consultant may hold to the mantra that there are no bad ideas, this film stands as unhappy testimony to the fact that there is such a thing as an unfunny joke.

I never thought I would find myself feeling sorry for the brilliantly talented Will Ferrell, but watching him trying to juice up this sorry excuse for a comedy script was at times painful. That’s not to say that there weren’t a few well-deserved laughs and Ferrell can find a nugget of humor in almost anything. But I don’t think I’ve seen such an unhappy collision of great comic talent and lame comic writing since Mike Myers “The Love Guru.”

And here’s a tip for director Brad Silberling: If you’re working with a lame joke, you don’t improve its chances for getting a laugh by dragging it out. “Land of the Lost” has a very bad habit of milking its weakest gags.

Needless to say, Will Ferrell’s talents are wasted in this second-rate effort—a real disservice to his many fans—as are the talents of the very charming Anna Friel.