You don't expect a reflection of the human condition from a Will Ferrell movie - but you'd want at least a couple of knuckleheaded, sophomoric laughs. Land of the Lost gives you exactly that and not much more.

Ferrell (right), the king of frat humour, takes his deadpan buffoonery out of contemporary set-ups and into a Jurassic setting that, according to his character, is 'somewhere in the past and future ... in a land of monkey people, lizard people and dinosaurs'.

Basically, he's running loose in an absurd mish-mash of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes - with Hong Kong's Big Buddha making a cameo a la the Statue of Liberty in Charlton Heston's ape world.

The plot is as dopey and suspect as his character Dr Rick Marshall's time-warping tachyon amplifier. It's a device that sends him, his assistant Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel of the TV series Pushing Daisies) and white-trash amusement park operator Will Stanton (Danny McBride) into another universe, where T-Rexes hold grudges, mosquitoes are the size of watermelons and early primates grunt but can also learn Broadway show tunes.

There are also bug-eyed reptilian beings that want to conquer the universe through space travel. In short, it's all quite nonsensical, but the film delivers a few jokes that beer buddies will guffaw at while girlfriends roll their eyes. At his best, Ferrell induces laughs from his fearless capacity to embarrass himself and mock his character's blustering egocentricity. Land of the Lost never goes that far - not even when he chugs from a jug of dino urine or boldly climbs out of a swimming pool in his soaking skivvies.

Worst of all, the movie - a loose adaptation of an early 1970s US children television series - can't decide whether it's aiming for the kiddies or the frat house. And it's just not especially funny: when a film's best gag references a minor Cher hit, that, my friend, is truly the land of the lost.