Michael Cera and Jack Black in "Year One" (Sony Pictures).

Year One

I was not excited to watch Year One, the Jack Black-Michael Cera comedy about cavemen who inexplicably find themselves in the middle of various Bible stories. The trailers for the film, which (like all trailers) ironically are carefully constructed by expert marketers to inspire interest in a movie, had the opposite effect on me. Black and Cera each looked to be recycling their trademark shticks: One a crude partier oblivious to his lack of finesse or sex appeal; the other a shambling fount of childlike passive-aggression. These personae have worked just fine many times before, but both caricatures have been wearing out their welcome lately; and worse, the actors themselves don’t seem to have many other arrows in their respective creative quivers. So that looked depressing, and the movie itself – Hey, we’re wearing loincloths! And throwing rocks at each other! Laugh already! – didn’t seem to offer much more.

The trailers were right. Year One is fitfully funny, but those fits are too sparse among a unrelenting landscape of innuendo, gay jokes and Black/Cera-isms. If you’ve ever seen Black express confusion that he isn’t the coolest guy in the room, or watched Cera mumble about how a situation isn’t going the way he would have liked, you’ve seen this duo’s sole contributions to this movie. Critics in particular have picked on Cera lately, complaining that he’s been playing the exact same role over and over. That it’s never bothered me before now probably has a lot to do with his general skill at picking good movies (Juno, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Superbad). That streak ends here.

This poor man’s Hope and Crosby play Zed (Black) and Oh (Cera), an inadequate hunter and an ineffective gatherer for their tribe of cavemen. When Zed nibbles on a tree bearing the forbidden fruit of knowledge – the first sign that Year One is willing to toss coherence aside in favor of whatever jokes are handy – the pair are ostracized, and head out to make new lives for themselves. From then on it’s Bible Study Time, as they run into Cain and Abel (David Cross and Paul Rudd), Abraham and Isaac (Hank Azaria and Superbad’s Christopher Mintz-Plasse), the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and so on.

Make no mistake: This is not a laugh-free zone. But most of the real humor comes from the supporting characters, like Azaria as the pompously stentorian Abraham: “We are the Hebrews – a righteous people, not very good at sports.” Or Oliver Platt playing a high priest as high priss; he follows the meek Oh around like a love-starved puppy. I would have loved to see more of Cross and Rudd’s brotherly irritations, but the script foolishly squanders that opportunity by cutting to the legendarily murderous chase too soon. And that’s the big problem with Year One: Director Harold Ramis (yes, that Harold Ramis, the ’80s comedy genius) mistakenly believes that Zed and Oh are the true humor centers of his film, and thus keeps abandoning the concept of an intriguing Biblical satire in favor of righteous-dude buffoonery and shy-guy self-effacement.

You can have a good time at Year One, but it’s hard not to consider what the film could have been had Ramis – a brilliant screenwriter when he wants to be – concentrated on his material rather than on his stars. Or, failing that, if he had just cast actors with something new to show us. 3

Erich Van Dussen is managing editor of Rochester Film Journal. You can reach him at info@rochesterfilm.com.