Review: ‘Year One’

It was in 335 BC in his works entitled “Poetics” that Aristotle divided poetry into three categories: Tragedy, Comedy, and Epic verse.  The term “Comedy” was set by the Greeks and the Romans to mean any form of stage play that ended with a happy ending.  It was in later years that the term became synonymous with laughter.

‘Year One’ takes place long before this period of time, and, to watch it, you begin to wonder if comedy even existed before Aristotle came along.   The writers and director behind this movie, Harold Ramis, Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, are no strangers to comedy.   Between the three of them, they have been behind such modern classics as ‘Vacation,’ ‘Groundhog Day,’ and the American version of “The Office.”  Unfortunately, the three of them together have come up with ‘Year One,’ a “comedy” only in the sense that it challenges its audience to laugh even if it never quite succeeds in doing so.

The first laugh of the movie is nothing horrible.  A group of cavemen are hunting a yak through a forest area.  They stalk their prey ever so diligently, and, just as they are ready to attack, a spear comes in from the side of the frame piercing one of the cavemen’s back.  The spear was thrown by Zed (Jack Black), a rather lethargic and unintelligent hunter.

Zed’s best friend in the tribe is Oh (Michael Cera), a gatherer who never quite knows if he is coming or going.  After partaking in the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Zed and Oh find themselves banished from the tribe, and we follow them in their adventures out into the unknown landscape of this prehistoric world.

‘Year One’ plays like the last sketch of a middle-of-the-season episode of “Saturday Night Live” strung over the course of a 90-minute frame with every kind of bathroom joke known to man.   It seems like Ramis and crew have written out a checklist of every known form of gross-out humor and go down the list, marking them off as they toss them into their screenplay. Every time the film feels like it hasn’t tried to make you laugh for 10 minutes, someone has to urinate upside down into their own face or someone else decides they have to eat bear feces as part of being a tracker.

The form of humor found in ‘Year One’ is extremely amateurish. It is amazing to consider the levels of comedy created by the people behind this movie, and that’s not even including Black and Cera who have been in some of the finer comedies over the past few years. You begin to wonder what happened in the film’s script phase that warranted this idea to throw in as many easily discarded bathroom jokes as possible.

The movie’s script does have a few moments here and there that could have, in more capable hands, come off as near great. Zed and Oh stumble upon Cain and Abel (David Cross and Paul Rudd, respectively).   They are a pair of bickering siblings, and you know how their story ends up from your Sunday school. It’s violent comedy at first when you watch Cross begin to beat Rudd with a large rock. However, the joke grows extremely weak extremely fast as Rudd’s Abel appears to be resurrected time and time again only to be beat down with increasing force. One flurry of rock smashes into the skull equals funny. Eight or nine equals mind-numbing coarseness.

Later Zed and Oh come across Abraham (Hank Azaria) just as he is about to sacrifice his son, Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). It isn’t very long before circumcisions are introduced and jokes abound about people getting the ends of their penises sliced off. Earth-shattering comedy here, folks.

Black and Cera, like most of the cast, make as much out of what they have. Black throws his crazy and arrogant gazes around whenever he can. Cera plays honest and confused better than anyone. It really is inspired casting that put these two in these roles. It is just so evident that neither they nor Ramis can get the film’s pace moving more than a meandering crawl. It is rather fitting that the film features a chase scene involving laggard yaks pulling bulky carts. It is one of only a few times the film pulls out more than a slight chuckle from its audience. Even the chuckles show themselves with decreasing frequency as the film progresses.

Oliver Platt shows up as a homosexual High Priest and Vinnie Jones makes an undersized appearance as a member of a royal army. They both do what they can with what they have, but that isn’t saying much. An early candidate for Best Supporting Performance of the year goes to Platt’s fake chest hair in a scene involving rubbing oil. It’s very gross, and it doesn’t even come close to making you laugh.

It appears Ramis, Stupnitsky, and Eisenberg’s screenplay was a victim of the Writers Guild strike, as there really isn’t much that could have been written here. The shooting schedule of the film fell right in the middle of that time, and it seems whenever they came to a hole in their screenplay, they filled it with every form of juvenile humor they could get their hands on.

In the end, that is all ‘Year One’ amounts to, a rather large hole filled with scatological comedy, an empty vessel that throws toilet humor at its audience like a monkey throwing…wait for it…bananas. Whether it is a more offensive film than the recent ‘Land of the Lost’ remains to be seen, and the comparison between the two is rather valid. Both feature a cast and crew that you would think would deliver a first-rate comedy. Unfortunately, both deliver a solid 90 minutes of injected indelicacies posing as something funnier than it is. Being on the receiving end of a stoning is more fun than ‘Year One.’ Maybe that’s pushing it, but not by much.