Will Ferrell: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

2. Dr. Rick Marshall - Land Of The Lost (2009)

Some films are just doomed to failure. When the first trailers for Land of the Lost came out, the general attitude was "Well, that looks pretty bad." And it proved just about everyone right when it did come out. It's a lazily made and largely unfunny mess of a dinosaur-movie parody, and Will Ferrell is mainly responsible for spearheading right it into the ground. For a man who'd forged his own style and made his name as one of the front-runners of mainstream comedy, there's a shocking amount of clichés and comic failures to his performance as Rick Marshall the paleontologist. Most of the time he just runs around shouting idioms and phrases that are both too obvious and too poorly delivered to be effective. True, Ron Burgundy sits on a throne of weird sayings, but at least the man had some flavour. Rick Marshall has that stench of a man who's trying way, way too hard. Ferrell's role in Land of the Lost easily qualifies as a member of the embarrassing performances society. We don't get any of that forcefulness of his early '00s work - instead all we get is a man whose only concern is to make someone laugh, failing in the process and leaving himself high and dry with no other thespian qualities to save the day. If you were to base your opinion of Ferrell on this film, you'd think he didn't even know what comedy was.