Jack Black and Michael Cera fail to strike the right chord. © 2009 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
With Harold ‘That white guy in Ghostbusters who wasn’t Bill Murray or Dan Akroyd’ Ramis directing, and Judd Apatow bringing some of his friends along as producer, Year One certainly had the promise of humour; even if it was a somewhat hesitant one.
The story follows two prehistoric pals, hunter Zed (Jack Black) and gatherer Oh (Michael Cera), who are kicked out of their Eden-like tribe after the latter samples a piece of forbidden fruit. Undeterred, they push forward through the Old Testament, until for some reason they find themselves serving as guards in the city of Sodom.
Year One plays a lot like a Chevy Chase vacation-based film in that, there’s a joke, and another joke, and another joke and then the movie finishes; the mood created being more like a sketch show. This in itself is fine; the Monty Python films were never all that big on exposition. But then, in Monty Python most of the jokes were funny.
The combination of Black and Cera doesn’t really work, with each actor playing the same character that they’ve always played, except with longer hair. There are some laughs to be had from the cameo appearances, with the brother bashing Cain (David Cross) and the son sacrificing Abraham (Hank Azaria) stealing the scene whenever they’re on camera, but it doesn’t happen enough.
There’s nothing in Year One that we haven’t seen before, with the obvious exception being Jack Black’s consumption of human excrement. But if that alone is not enough to pique your interest and you’re after something a little more avant-garde, you’d probably be better off ingesting some illicit substance and getting a ticket to Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Now that’s a wild ride.
