Will Ferrell Movies

When Will Ferrell was struggling to break out on Saturday Night Live, the election of George W. Bush came as a gift from God. The new President gave him a character with a greater reach than one of those head-bobbing Roxbury guys–so it’s only just that Ferrell, now a marquee-topping movie star, should cap off the Bush years with this final homage. You’re Welcome America. A Final Night with George W. Bush is not so much a political satire as a fever dream, a hallucinatory exorcism. Ferrell paints Bush as an arrested adolescent, simultaneously self-absorbed yet without a hint of self-reflection, but beyond that there’s not much commentary on the actions or collective psyche of the Bush administration (though some of the most startling gags turn out to be true). Instead, Ferrell spins out 90 minutes of faux-personal anecdotes that blur into crass surrealism: Dreaming of a cabin getaway with another man that includes a description of a “Western-grip” version of a certain sexual act; gaping at a muscular Barbara Bush rescuing all the Bush men from a collapsed mine shaft; performing robotic dance moves with Condoleeza Rice; demanding a squadron of wild monkeys be trained for combat; and imitating, obsessively, a Castillian lisp. It is a very strange performance, captured live at Broadway theater and later broadcast on HBO. Ten years from now, audiences may stare, perplexed and hypnotized, at this show, unable to comprehend what it’s about–which may be entirely the point. –Bret Fetzer

How to make a big-screen version of Sid and Marty Krofft’s Seventies TV show? In this case, place the thing in the meaty hands of Will Ferrell and give the special effects a big upgrade. If you grew up with the show, you will recall that Marshall, Will, and Holly fall through a time warp into a land where dinosaurs roam and all kind of weird things grow. In this version, Ferrell plays a disgraced scientist, Anna Friel a brainy postgraduate, and Danny McBride (Pineapple Express) the sleazy owner of a desert tourist trap that happens to be home to the time portal. This begins to suggest how this movie wants to have it both ways: keep some of the original’s kid appeal, but raunch it up just enough for fans of Judd Apatow’s movies. The result is that nothing really works very well. There’s no momentum to the plot, the locations are monotonous, and Ferrell and McBride are desperate in their attempts to generate something out of nothing. Granted, they succeed a few times–these guys are too funny to whiff completely–but the strain is visible. And although the effects, are competent, the movie can’t even get its fantasy rules straight (why is the T. Rex sometimes ferocious and sometimes indifferent?). Fans of the show will enjoy hearing the cheesy theme song worked in (Ferrell performs a zonked version) and seeing how the movie updates the menacing Sleestaks. But on a basic level Land of the Lost has no idea what it’s doing, or what it means to do. –Robert Horton