Harold Ramis is one of the nicest people I’ve met in the movie business, and I’m so sorry “Year One” happened to him. I’m sure he had the best intentions.
In trying to explain why the movie was produced, I have a theory. Ramis is the top-billed of three writers, and he is so funny that when he read some of these lines, they sounded hilarious.
Pity he didn’t play one of the leads in his own film.
As always, I carefully avoided any of the movie’s trailers, but I couldn’t avoid the posters or the ads. “Meet Your Ancestors,” they said, with big photos of Jack Black and Michael Cera. I assumed it was about Adam and Eve.
Cera has smooth, delicate features, and with curly locks falling to below his shoulders, I thought: “Michael Cera in drag. I wonder where Harold will take that?” But, no, even though Cera is sometimes mistaken for a woman, he’s all primitive man, banging women on the head.
Then he and Black eat of the forbidden apple and make a leap from tribal “hunter-gatherers” (a term they enjoy) to royal security guards. Everyone throughout the film talks like anyone else in a Judd Apatow comedy, somewhere between stoned and crafty.
Black and Cera were not born to be co-stars. Black was fresh and funny once, a reason then to welcome him in a movie, but here he forgets to act and simply announces his lines. Cera plays shy and uncertain, but then he always does, and here he responds to Black as if Jack were Juno and a source of intimidating wit.
Another leading role is taken by Oliver Platt, as an extremely hairy high priest who orders Cera to massage his chest with oil. The close-up of Cera kneading Platt’s matted chest foliage is singularly unappetizing. There are good-looking babes in the city (did I mention that the city is Sodom?), who, as required in such films, all find the heroes inexplicably attractive.
Cera and Juno Temple have a good exchange. She plays a slave. “When do you get off?” he asks. “Never.”
That and other of the film’s better moments are in the trailer, of which it can be said, if they were removed from the film, it would be bereft of better moments.
The movie takes place in the land now known as Israel (then too, I think), although no one does much with that. The Sodomites include in their number Abraham, Cain and Abel; it’s surprising to find them still in action in the Year One, since Genesis places them well, before the time of the Year One. Sodomy is not very evident in Sodom, perhaps as a result of the movie being shaved down from an R to a PG-13.
The film has shaggy crowds that mill about like outtakes from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” and human sacrifices in which virgins are pitched into the blazing mouth of a stone ox, and a cheerful turn when the gods more appreciate a high priest than a virgin.
But “Year One” is a dreary experience, and all the ending accomplishes is to bring it to a close. Even in the credit cookies, you don’t sense the actors having much fun.
“YEAR ONE”
PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, brief strong language and comic violence. 1 hour, 40 minutes. Directed by Harold Ramis; written by Ramis, Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg; starring Jack Black, Michael Cera, Oliver Platt, David Cross, Hank Azaria, Juno Temple. Opens today at area theaters.
