Year One seems to exist for no reason other than to have Michael Cera and Jack Black play themselves. While wearing tattered furs and loincloths. Sometimes the pairing of two big name comedy stars reaps terrible rewards, and this would be such an occasion. I've been following this film pretty intensely because I wanted to see how awful it would be. But after discovering that legendary filmmaker/actor Harold Ramis was helming it, I hoped that it would atleast be a passable comedy. I figured if anyone could turn it into something watchable it'd be Ramis, who brought us such classics as Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day. But here he seems to mining old, familiar territory and not doing anything particularly funny with it. It doesn't help that he gets no support by the two main stars.
Year One is a biblical comedy, not a prehistoric one like you might expect. There's no running away from dinosaurs or anything like that. Cera and Black play a pair of bumbling hunter/gatherers Oh and Zed, ultimately thrown out of their tribe for their incompetence. Oh, and eating forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Kindof a bad thing. It happens for no reason other than to give a reason to throw them out. The pair run across a host of biblical figures, including Cain and Abel(David Cross & Paul Rudd), presented here as a pair of constantly bickering siblings. It's not funny in the least. Paul Rudd is particularly wasted, and I'm sure he must've owed someone a favor to even show up to this thing. Cain ultimately betrays the two oafs, selling them into slavery, where the two discover that their entire tribe including the two unimportant and frankly not that hot women they wanted to be with are slaves also. Escaping, again for no apparent reason, the two decide to rescue their captured loves(who don't know they exist, mind you).
I'm sure that on paper the teaming of Cera and Black seemed like a surefire winner. Black at one time had a real freshness to his style, although it never really appealed to me. He always seemed like he needed to tone it down a few notches, and the few occasions where he does he's quite enjoyable. Here, he's back to his old ways and it is a crashing bore. Zed is a maniac with no off switch. It's Jack Black unfiltered, and if you like that sortof thing then you'll dig it. Unfortunately I can't stand to watch it. There's a scene where Zed, playing the role of hunter that he failed so miserably at earlier, sniffs and ultimately eats some animal crap. That's about the level of humor you're going to get out of this thing.
Michael Cera is another issue. I'm getting tired of his timid, meely mouthed schtick. It works when he's got a reliable counterpart, be it Jonah Hill or Ellen Page, or even Jason Bateman. But here paired with Black it doesn't work. The two have no chemistry whatsoever, and it's a wonder that these two are friends other than the fact that they are both screw ups.
I'm not sure what Harold Ramis was going for. It's almost like he was trying to create some sort of prehistoric Superbad, because the dynamic is almost similar only not funny. Not realistic. Not worth investing in. It's almost sad that such a comedy icon is reduced to making worthless, forgettable junk like Year One. Hell, even his Bedazzled was better than this! I think that sums up how I feel about this movie perfectly. It's worse than Bedazzled. There ya go.
4/10
