Year One

There is a strange disconnect between the talent that's behind Year One, and the final result that's up on the screen. You see the names in the opening credits, but the movie that follows doesn't look like something they should have any part in. The director and co-writer is Harold Ramis (Caddyshack, Groundhog's Day). The producer is Judd Apatow, the current king of smart adult comedies. The cast includes such names as Jack Black, Michael Cera, Oliver Platt, David Cross, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Bill Hader, and Paul Rudd - all actors I've admired in other comedies. You'd think with all this talent, there would at least be a couple good laughs in store.

I didn't laugh once. I smiled a couple times early on, but I never laughed. This is a tired and witless comedy that doesn't seem to go anywhere. It also barely has a beginning, middle, and an end. It's a series of loosely connected skits, as the lead characters wander the land, and the movie meanders along with them, looking for a point. It would be one thing if the skits were funny. There's promise everywhere, but no potential is ever met. As the title suggests, the film is set in 1 A.D., and follows a pair of characters named Zed (Jack Black) and Oh (Michael Cera) as they encounter various faces and places from the Bible. The movie's not interested in actually parodying anything from the Bible itself, mind you. They meet feuding brothers Cain and Abel (David Cross and Paul Rudd), Abraham and his son Jacob (Hank Azaria and Christopher Mintz-Plasse), and visit the city of Sodom. But nothing is actually done with these characters or places. There's no real plot to connect them, either. The characters just show up, say a few lines, then disappear. It's movies like this that really make you appreciate the risks the Monty Python group took when they did Life of Brian.

The movie starts out harmless enough, and even seems like it might be fun. Zed and Oh are members of a small tribal village, and generally treated as outcasts. Once this is established, the very next scene features Zed deciding to take a bite out of the forbidden fruit, hoping to gain knowledge that will make him the smartest man in the tribe. We get an early glimpse of how lazy this movie will be during this scene. While Zed takes a bite out of the apple, Oh finds a snake slowly wrapping itself around him. The movie then immediately cuts to the next scene, not even bothering to establish a gag or a pay off. Zed is banished from the tribe for eating the fruit, and accidentally burns the village down as he exits. This forces Oh to go along with him on his journey, since he lost everything in the fire. This makes up a majority of the film, as the two characters wander to nowhere in particular. They just keep on stumbling upon people and places. There is a half-hearted attempt at an actual plot, when the two learn that the women they longed for back at their home village are now slaves in Sodom. How this happened, the movie doesn't go out of its way to explain. What the movie does have time for, however, is an extended and unfunny gross out gag where Oh is forced to rub oil all over a very fat, hairy, and horny high priest (Oliver Platt, in a career low point).

There are many other similar gags where that came from, including Zed willingly eating feces, and Oh urinating on himself as he's hung upside down in chains in a prison cell. This obviously begs the question, who is this movie made for? This kind of humor is too juvenile for any adult to enjoy, but the movie itself is far too crude for kids. Year One is PG-13, trimmed from its original R rating, but that doesn't make it any less vulgar or inappropriate for young viewers. In order for this kind of humor to work, it has to have a build up, or at least seem like it has a place in the movie. The gags I described above come out of nowhere, and seem to be a lazy attempt at shock humor. It's a cry of desperation from a movie that knows it's not working. The actors seem to know they're stuck in a turkey, also. Jack Black does his usual enthusiastic wild man comic performance, but it seems a lot more forced here than usual. Michael Cera made me smile a couple times with his deadpan comic delivery, but it still comes across as a pale imitation of his usual screen persona. As for the supporting cast, the less said, the better.

As I was watching the movie, I tried to figure out how it went so wrong. It must have sounded good at one point on paper. My guess is that this movie didn't get developed enough. The studio bosses pictured in their mind Jack Black wearing a loincloth, had a chuckle, and then gave the script a go without thinking it through. We can sometimes see the basic ingredients of a successful or funny scene, but they needed to be built on in order for us to laugh. As it is, the movie is more depressing than funny. It's sad to see so much talent wasted on so little. It's even more depressing when you watch the outtakes and bloopers during the end credits, and not only are they not funny, but the actors don't even really seem to be enjoying themselves in the first place. You almost wish you were watching a documentary on the making of this film, and how it went wrong. Now that would be an interesting movie, and it'd probably be a lot funnier too, because the actors would probably feel a lot more comfortable being themselves on camera.

Year One is such a pathetic little movie that it doesn't really end. It kind of slows down to a crawl and stops, letting the credits release us from its misery. How wrong-headed is this movie? It doesn't even have the sense to put its best gag in the foreground. In one scene, Zed and Oh are about to be stoned to death by angry villagers. As they await their fate, we hear a soldier in the background reading off the crimes they've been charged with. I was able to make out "thievery, puppetry, and animal husbandry", and a long list of other absurd charges. Leave it to this movie to cut away from the one bit of dialogue that came close to making me laugh.

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