Ugh!

Year One is a shabby and slothful insult to Neanderthals everywhere

By Philip Martin

Zed (Jack Black) and Oh (Michael Cera) are cast out on their own in Year One.

ADVERSTISMENT

LITTLE ROCK — In the beginning, there was the dud. There have been plenty of movies worse than Year One, which we hope marks the nadir of the Judd Apatow laugh franchise, but they are painful to recall. And the movie reviewer's brain is such that we tend to develop a kind of defensive amnesia. We forget that Harold Ramis is the operative intelligence behind The Ice Harvest, the Bedazzled remake and Stuart Saves His Family while we fondly recall Groundhog Day and Caddyshack - although, come to think of it, Caddyshack isn't that great.

Movie

Year One

68

Rating: PG-13

Length: 1 hour, 40 minutes

More information

If you consider that last remark blasphemous, then you might at least be mildly interested in this lazy, vulgar and (worst of all) crashingly boring tale of prehistoric Neanderthal buddies Zed (Jack Black) and Oh (Michael Cera) rambling across a biblical landscape, wreaking mild havoc with Old Testament figures including Cain (David Cross) and Abel (an uncredited Paul Rudd), Adam (big daddy Ramis himself) and Abraham (a wild-eyed Hank Azaria who should someday play John Brown, the martyr of Harper's Ferry).

No doubt designed as a secular humanism takedown of hoary Bible stories, the movie's somewhat promising casting is undermined by a sketchy, skittery script that leans heavily on the presumptive charms of co-stars Black and Cera.

While both of these actors can be very funny, Year One proves they both need more than a chance to indulge their respective shticks. Black's over-the-top hubristic rants are predictable, and Ramis the director seems not to trust Cera's quiet whiny asides - the movie often seems to hustle right past what might have been genuinely funny moments. (There's a witty line in the trailer that flops in the film, and not just because we see it coming - Ramis cuts away so quickly that we don't have time to absorb it.)

Although it's silly to talk about lapses in continuity and internal logic in what aspires to be an anarchic frat-house comedy, Year One is so shabbily edited we feel disrespected by the filmmakers. It's like they weren't even trying.

They probably were - but they were probably also relying on Black and Cera to supply the film with the complementary magic that inspired pairings can produce. And we can understand the denaturing of the jokes and the telescoping of several millennia - the boys spend the last half of the movie in the Ur sin city Sodom - as an absurdist strategy. But in the end Year One is too mild even to shock the biblically literate pious (who ironically might be the ones in the best position to "get" the film). At the screening we attended, we guessed some of the early walk-outs might be offended Christians, but later we understood that people were leaving simply because they had better things to do than see the wretched thing through to the end.

On the way out, one lady stopped to plead, "You can't give this one a high rating, can you?"

No ma'am. The dud was not good.

MovieStyle, Pages 35, 40 on 06/19/2009