Year One‘s director Harold Ramis has explained that what
separates his Old Testament comedy from Mel Brooks’ The History of
the World, Part I is its narrative continuity. Because Year
One has no unifying point or point-of-view, that difference is
negligible. This is still an episodic sketch film, and a mostly flat
one at that. The situation has promise: Zed (Jack Black) and Oh
(Michael Cera), a hunter and a gatherer, walk through Biblical Times
with the sensibility of 21st-century frat boys. They see Cain kill
Abel. They stop Abraham from killing Isaac. They chase the girls of
their dreams in the party town of Sodom. But Zed and Oh don’t become a
comparable Bible story in their own right. The feces- and
castration-obsessed script is underwritten to the point that jokes
don’t bother to be funny. At one point, the duo stop in their tracks
upon noticing a cougar growling at them from a tree. The unexpected
twist? The cougar jumps out of the tree. End of scene. The screening I
attended seemed largely comprised of teenage girls infatuated with
Michael Cera. Even 2,000 years ago, that demographic would demand
better punchlines.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2009.