In 2009, a big-budget Will Ferrell-led comedy went up against a smaller, scrappier upstart at the summer box office – and Land of the Lost promptly got its ass kicked by The Hangover, which went on to spawn the multiple sequels that Universal execs probably wanted from Ferrell’s Saturday morning adaptation. Now, many years later, the Ferrell movie has been hanging out in the Max Top 10 most-streamed movies. But is it actually worth reclaiming, or should everyone choose The Hangover all over again?

The Gist: Granted, it’s a weird idea. Take a live-action Saturday morning staple about a family stranded in a prehistoric-like dimension, blow it up to big-budget scale, and ditch the family element in the process. So instead of dad Rick, son Marshall, and daughter Holly, Land of the Lost follows laughingstock scientist Rick (Will Ferrell), doctoral candidate Holly (Anna Friel), and local oaf Will (Danny McBride) as they’re sucked through a time warp and wind up in an alternate universe, sort of a cross-era junkyard where dinosaurs and other strange creatures still roam around. They explore this land of the lost; Rick and Holly fall in love, Rick and Will go on an accidental drug trip, and Rick forms a Looney Tunes-like rivalry with a tyrannosaur. They also meet the ape-man Chaka (Jorma Taccone) and engage in various cartoonish and/or absurdist situations.  

What Will It Remind You Of?: Ferrell is playing another insecure man-child, so there’s an obvious kinship with his better comedies of this era, like Step Brothers and The Other Guys. But in the movie’s mix of inventive visual effects and goofy dialogue from comedy stars, in a movie that will appeal to kids even though it’s not really for kids, it’s not too far removed from something like Ghostbusters. Not on that level, mind you, but a similar cross between Saturday Night Live and Saturday morning.

Performance Worth Watching: Most of the movie is Ferrell, Friel, McBride, and Taccone, and they’re all fun, though it’s McBride who probably pops through most decisively. (Then again, Friel hasn’t been in a lot of big movies since, so maybe she’s the one to savor.) 

Sex and Skin: That’s maybe the one area where the film could be described as tasteful.  

Memorable Dialogue: Ferrell has plenty of funny outbursts, but I’m fond of a particularly deranged mini-monologue where he suggests that with rations low, they might want to kill and eat Chaka – and then goes on to speculate about the best way to cook him.

Our Take: Yes, Todd Phillips won the long-forgotten summer 2009 comedy battle royale; The Hangover grossed many times more than Land of the Lost, spawned two sequels, kickstarted several careers, and eventually somehow led to Phillips receiving an Academy Award nomination. Land of the Lost, meanwhile, put Ferrell in a kind of box-office time out as his biggest-budget disaster, and more or less ended the big-studio career of director Brad Siberling (who also made Casper and the Lemony Snicket movie). But I don’t know, man: I’d give the edge to Land of the Lost on both laughs and visual inventiveness, despite its ignominious IP origins. Even the first Hangover leaves an unpleasant aftertaste, because Phillips rarely seems truly happy to be making comedies; Ferrell, meanwhile, has an infectious commitment and good cheer.  

Usually the problem with all of those big special-effects comedies that try to recapture the Ghostbusters magic is that it’s difficult to reconcile the looseness and seeming spontaneity of comedy riffs with the technical planning needed to execute a bunch of complicated effects shots. For whatever reason, Land of the Lost mixes them pretty well; the sets and CG creatures have a kind of what-the-hell weirdness and tactility that successful recreates the show’s aesthetic on a bigger budget, while Ferrell and McBride still have room to goof around. After so many Jurassic Park movies, it’s novel to see a creature feature (of sorts) where a giant, fearsome dino is conceived as a comic foe, rather than a force of nature. Now, unlike Ferrell’s classic comedies with Adam McKay, there’s no grander satirical point here, nor is the cast stacked with comic ringers able to elevate every dialogue scene into a kind of batty masculine-panic poetry. But among his non-McKay comedies, Land of the Lost stands with Elf and Blades of Glory as one of Ferrell’s funnier efforts of the 2000s (and frankly, few of his starring roles since 2010 have topped this one, either). Even though it might seem perverse to jettison the most kid-friendly elements of the original series, slightly older kids – tweens, for example, who dig the similarly silly effects-comedy hybrid Minecraft – might actually find the movie a workable PG-13 gateway to SNL-related comedy. Hey, sort of like Ghostbusters back in its day!

Our Call: If you like Ferrell, or McBride, or the idea of zany dinosaurs and bizarre lizard people wearing tunics, what are you waiting for? STREAM IT.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.

Stream Land of the Lost on Max