Ferrell's Career Looks Lost Indeed

Will Ferrell’s Land of the Lost is so far a box office bomb, and that’s no accident, Chris Nashawaty writes in Entertainment Weekly. It’s “just the latest proof that Ferrell’s shtick—the clueless, self-deprecating blowhard man-child—is growing stale.” Step Brothers, Semi Pro, The Producers, and Bewitched were either painful or been-there. “It’s time to change it up, man,” Nashawaty advises.

If you bothered to laugh watching Land of the Lost previews, it was just “out of conditioned response to Ferrell’s previous track record.” It’s not that Ferrell wasn’t funny in movies like Anchorman, but his problem is predictability. “You can put him in a NASCAR jumpsuit, a basketball uniform, or a quantum paleontologist’s khakis,” Nashawaty writes, “but he’s pretty much always the same guy.” (More entertainment stories.)