I was never familiar with the TV show on which this film is based, so have nothing I can compare it too, but I know enough to imagine some screenwriter took the barest bones of the premise, threw in a bunch of fairly lame jokes and then sold it to a studio. Then a second screenwriter gave it a pass just to shoehorn in jokes that would suit Will Ferrell's shtick and they got down to filming.

Therefore the film is as slapdash as you'd expect and as patchy as most of Will Ferrell's movies have been of late - and about as funny, which is to say it generates barely a few chuckles.

A disgraced scientist (Ferrell) once notorious for his theories about parallel universes finds out he was right and is transported into one of them along with an admiring student (Friel) and a redneck desert theme park owner (McBride).

There they find anachronisms from distant time periods from dinosaurs (quelle surprise) to 50s era motels and a being apparently trapped in an interdimensional prison by his enemies that they vow to help.

It's as if the studio signed off on the first round of dumb ideas the writer and producer had during a drunken pizza night and while the result is not quite a travesty, it's very ill-considered. Where $100m went on such cheap rubber suits and videogame-grade CGI is also a mystery.