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Visual:		6.0
Audio:		6.0
Acting:		3.0
Writing:		3.0
Score:		4.0

Director(s):	Harold Ramis
Writer(s):	Harold Ramis, Lee Eisenberg, Gene Stupnitsky
Starring:	Jack Black
Genre:	Comedy
Website:	http://www.yearone-themovie.com
Release Date:	June 19, 2009
Rated:

There is a short play by the author David Ives called Babel’s In Arms about a Laurel and Harvey/Abbott and Costello styled comic duo building the Tower of Babel in the unsteady religious landscape of the Biblical era. The world is on the verge of accepting monotheism, but is still largely defined by tribalism and the worship of golden idols. Thus, the two are constantly bickering (in remarkably modern dialect) over which of their individual gods is the right one to great comedic effect. The underlying message is clear: to base one’s entire opinion of the universe on ancient texts is kind of ridiculous. Year One has essentially the same set-up, but is far less successful for a number of reasons, the first of which being that Babel’s is only ten minutes long, while Year One is a whole hour and half, wearing out its welcome in approximately the same amount of time it takes for Babel’s to reach its climax.

Zed (Jack Black) and Oh (Michael Cera) are cavemen in the most traditional sense of the word. They hunt (usually ineptly), they gather (usually at the mocking of the more masculine tribesmen), and they unsuccessfully lust after Maya (June Diane Raphael) and Eema (Juno Temple), two of the more attractive women in the tribe. After Zed eats the fruit of the nearby Tree of Knowledge (the Bible and natural history are mixed sort of incongruously here), he and Oh are banished from the tribe and have a series of misadventures in the ancient world which are only loosely strung together by the goal of saving Maya and Eema from slavery after they have been captured by the soldiers of Sodom and Gomorrah. Predominant characters include Cain and Abel (David Cross and Paul Rudd), Abraham and Isaac (Hank Azaria and Christopher Mintz-Plasse), and Princess Inanna (Olivia Wilde, recently voted the hottest woman in the world by Maxim magazine).

The first major problem (and the most serious one that the film never hurdles) is that it really only has one joke to pass around, which is the sight of characters in ancient times talking, you know, as if they were people in the modern day, occasionally throwing in words like ‘begat’ and ‘smite’ out of context in case you didn’t get the joke in the first place. Imagine this being done by people doing repetitive Jack Black and Michael Cera impersonations for an entire feature length film. You know Role Models, Knocked Up, The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall? Imagine them playing out with all of those interchangeable characters in loincloths and goofy haircuts, and you’ve basically got it. Except that what made those films was their sense of spontaneity and improvisation, which, due to the budget onscreen here, never really comes across, and scenes lay flat instead of animating.

The second major problem is that the film never rises to the challenge of its subject matter. Taking on religion is a pretty heady target for any satirist, and even harder to do it with any sense of relevance, but Year One never even tries; the most dangerous joke in the entire film is one about Jews not being good at sports. It makes oblique references to religious symbols, and at the end it seems to be trying to be making a point about not blindly obeying demagogic figures, but none of it is direct enough (or gutsy enough) to give the film any kind of edge, or save it from feeling like the kid who went to the top of the water slide only to chicken out once he was actually faced with going through with what he told all of his friends he was going to.

If there’s anything good to say about Year One, it’s that occasionally one of the numerous celebrity cameos works serviceably. Mintz-Plasse and Azaria have their moments, and some times Cross almost tricks you into thinking something really funny is going to happen;  and the less said about Oliver Platt’s High Priest of Sodom, the better. But there’s really nothing that anybody can do to prevent this film from registering as a huge disappointment, when it even registers at all. One would like to blame it all on a failure of imagination, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that it was a failure of nerve and, frankly, of ambition.