Year One
Studio: Sony Pictures Releasing
Rated: PG-13
Cast: Jack Black, Michael Cera, Oliver Platt, David Cross, Hank Azaria
Director: Harold Ramis
WorkNameSort: Year One
Our Rating: 2.00
To paraphrase Charles Darwin, adaptation is a bitch. It’s a cruel process, one that leaves for dead the creatures that aren’t able to change along with their environment. If a finch’s beak can’t grow longer over several generations, as seeds get harder to reach the bird starves. If Ida the fossil hadn’t developed opposable thumbs, you wouldn’t be reading this review, on account of both of us being lemurs.
Likewise, time hasn’t been kind to Harold Ramis, writer and sometime director of some of the funniest films of all time: Animal House, Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day and on and on. Ramis went missing several years ago after back-to-back flops and now, thanks to his arguable heir, Judd Apatow, Ramis returns. The problem is that he’s awakened in a future much different than the time he knew; a fresh Golden Era of comedy that mines for laughs areas of the psyche that the famously bespeckled Ramis can’t bring into focus for the life of him. Year One sinks because his beak is too short for today’s habitat.
Year One stars Jack Black and Michael Cera as Neolithic losers relegated to gatherer status in a hunter-worshipping tribe. They each desire the affections of the tribe’s only two available women, and when Black’s character eats the ‘forbidden fruit,â?� he’s hit with the desire to escape their confines and go exploring. So they set off on a journey that takes them through Iron Age Mesopotamia (or thereabouts; the film’s millennia-hopping timeline is taken from the Old Testament’s similarly flawed one).
In its first half, Year One thuds as loudly as a caveman’s club. Black and Cera’s misadventures play like a series of SNL sketches that cut to the next sketch without any resolution. In one scene, Cera is about to be choked to death by a python. Then we cut to the next scene without any mention of what happened. In another, the guys are attacked by a cougar. How did they get out of that mess? We’ll never know. Rather than making sense of anything, Ramis is content to fling dung-eating, piss-drinking, testicle-hurling sight gags in place of comedy that actually arises from the plot.
The last act picks up considerably when they arrive at a rain-starved kingdom ruled by fey soothsayers and a beautiful princess who ‘has crabs.â?� Since Black and Cera’s characters aren’t part of their society, they also don’t buy into the city’s superstitions ‘ a fact that the villagers mistake (in a take on Kipling’s ‘The Man Who Would Be Kingâ?�) as proof that they’re ‘the chosen ones.â?� At this point, Year One finally finds its plot and Ramis’ storytelling instincts take over.
But the rest of it would not stand out as such a turkey if Ramis had trusted those instincts all along. Instead, he attempts to import Cera’s and Apatow’s comic literalism, alongside co-writers and The Office execs Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky’s flair for minutiae, into the kind of broad set-piece zaniness that brings out Black’s worst over-the-top neediness. Year One is a horse designed by committee to make a camel, and Harold Ramis, as much as today’s comedy stars owe him, is an unadaptable species.
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2009.