Waste of Time & Talent

Year One looked to be the comedy of the 2009 summer season. Judd Apatow (the King Midas of modern comedy) produced the film for his idol Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day, Caddyshack) who wrote the screenplay with the staff writers for the successful American version of The Office. The two leads of the movie are Jack Black and Michael Cera, who are supported by a bunch of able actors (including David Cross, Hank Azaria and Paul Rudd). It's a colossal shame, then, that Year One is an inexplicably unfunny, hit-and-miss comedy. It's not exactly an abject laugh famine, but with the film boasting such a large variety of comedic players behind and in front of the camera it wouldn't have been unreasonable to expect something far better than this.

The film introduces two cavemen protagonists: inept hunter Zed (Black) who has a tendency to annoy the tribe's more respected members, and equally inept, wimpy gatherer Oh (Cera). Neither of them have much luck with women - Maya (Raphael), the object of Zed's lust, perceives him as an unlikely provider, while Oh's would-be bedmate Eema (Temple) doesn't even know he exists. Zed gets fed up and bored with his life, and decides to eat forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Since this is a violation of tribal law, Zed is banished from the primitive village, and Oh joins him as they set out to explore the ancient world.

Director Ramis and his pair of screenwriters employ material from the first book of the Bible in the form of a sketch-comedy akin to Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I. In fact, Year One treats the Biblical book of "Genesis" not as a chronology of happenings but as a geographical road map instead. The Garden of Eden and Sodom are included, along with Cain, Abel, Abraham, Isaac and countless others - all separated by distance rather than time. The film isn't exactly a satire of Bible stories (it might've worked better had that been the objective) - it's instead a mismatched buddy movie which contains Biblical names and locations. This is not a necessarily bad idea, but laughs are crucial for a shallow comedy like this. It'd be remiss to say Year One never achieves chuckles, as it does occasionally, but these are a depressingly thin and disappointingly intermittent commodity. This could have been the new generation's Life of Brian, but that film had the advantage of a smart, inspired and hilarious screenplay written by the Monty Python troupe working at the pinnacle of their creative powers, and who were unafraid to push the boundaries in order to achieve comedic goals. Hindered by its PG-13 rating, Year One feels like the product of a group of writers having an off night with a paranoid studio executive supervising the process.

Year One plays it frustratingly safe. With little in the way of cutting Biblical humour or mockery of primitive cultures, the movie is crammed with gross-out humour, incest jokes and flat pop culture references. There's a brief scene featuring Bill Hader that fails so spectacularly that Hader himself is seen questiong the script during the end-credit outtakes. Year One might provoke belly laughs from 6 or 7-year-old kids who can't resist giggling at the image of someone farting or urinating on themselves, or someone munching on faecal matter, but what the film sorely lacks is ingenuity and wit. There's even a large orgy sequence which was probably designed to serve as the film's comedic centrepiece, but it's exasperatingly long without being funny or (thanks to the PG-13 rating) even sexy. Hell, the writers were even unable to come up with a single amusing Sodom joke; a task this reviewer could pull off over the course of a quick lunch break. Year One is a stillborn production that merely delivers 100 minutes of laugh-free scenarios.

Judd Apatow apparently has great affection for Harold Ramis, but allowing him to run wild with Year One was an ill-advised decision. The film's failure is almost entirely because of Ramis whose direction is clumsy and half-hearted, and whose sense of comic timing is slipshod. The story simply meanders along, awkwardly transitioning from one scene to the next. Ramis often cuts to the next skit before any real punchline; regularly generating the impression that huge chunks of the movie are missing. For instance, Oh is attacked by both a snake and a cougar early into the movie. But on both occasions, the film cuts to the next scene before we get to see how he gets out of it! Even the final scene ends with the characters just walking away. This is followed by an end-credit blooper reel full of flubs and on-set stuff-ups that allow an audience the opportunity to see just how little anyone cared about the production.

It's almost cruel to witness a procession of marvellous actors failing so miserably here. All these talented performers are unable to elevate the material beyond primary school depth. Furthermore, no-one in the cast pushes themselves beyond their established screen personas, with the respective shtick of Jack Black and Michael Cera - the bug-eyed, over-exuberant fat doofus and the mumbling, deadpan pork - growing tiresome very quickly. Black's comedic liveliness is usually only tolerable in small doses. With him receiving top billing and maximum screen time in Year One, he becomes grating. Cera, on the other hand, merely turns in the exact same performance we've seen him deliver in Superbad, Juno, and so on. The concept of pairing Black's bluster with Cera's reticence may have seemed foolproof in theory, but in practise the results are lethal.
Arguably, the only comedic highlight of Year One (if there is only one) is Hank Azaria's amusing interpretation of Abraham, though his screen-time is far too limited. The rest of the cast is awful, including Oliver Platt who hams it up and merely epitomises an abundance of gay jokes for his role. It would seem impossible to include a bad Paul Rudd cameo, but Harold Ramis is a can-do guy when it comes to pushing quality into the middle of the road - or, in this case, off the road and into a ditch!

Year One admittedly retains some energy, so it's tragic that this energy is squandered on a movie not really worth making. There are a few chuckles to be found here and there throughout the film, but they're so irregular that they only serve to highlight how the rest of it has utterly failed in that regard.

2.7/10