Alison Rowat's Review
There’s a pleasing symmetry to Harold Ramis’s otherwise lame comedy. Not only is it set in 1AD, most of the jokes date from about the same time. Boom, boom.
Michael Cera and Jack Black, the podgy funster whose charms wear thinner with each picture, are a pair of tribesmen cast out from their community and forced to wander through various biblical scenarios such as the spat between Cain and Abel and that business at Sodom and Gomorra. The timeline is all over the place, sometimes Old Testament, sometimes New. Wherever the writers think a joke is to be had, that’s where the action stumbles.
When not relying on the alleged hilarity to be had from speaking in modern language in ancient times, the comedy is essentially primitive, with poo jokes and breaking wind to the fore.
Cera, as seen in Juno and Superbad, has a distinctive comedy style - hip, urban, laid back to the point of somnambulant. You can see how someone though it would be funny to place this gentle soul in savage times, but it doesn’t work. With this type of material, a certain devil-may-care, Carry On-style gusto is required. Cera, however, goes through the picture as though he’s just had a warm, milky drink and is desperate for his blanky and a nap. Black displays a lot of energy, but we’ve seen it all before.
If Cera is an unlikely choice for his role, check out Mr Vinny Jones as Sargon the soldier. Like the picture as a whole, he’s about as funny as a plague of locusts.
In ten thousand years they’ll dig this out from the bottom of ye olde bargain DVD bucket and marvel that Ramis ever wrote and directed Groundhog Day.
Paul Greenwood's Review
Year One is the kind of movie Mel Brooks may well have tried his hand at 20 years ago, a scattershot spoof that transposes modern day language and idioms into a biblical setting. But, just like most of the output of late-period Brooks, it isn't remotely funny.
Its director Harold Ramis has been behind some of the best comedies of the last 30 years, from Ghostbusters to Groundhog Day, but it would appear that, like Brooks, he isn’t improving with age.
It represents something of a crossover between the old guard of Ramis and a new, Judd Apatow endorsed cast. Jack Black and Michael Cera play hunter gatherers, Zed and Oh.
They’re useless and put upon, but when Zed eats the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, they end up banished from their village and left to wander and wonder at what lies beyond the confines of their village and mountains.
On their journey they encounter the likes of Cain and Abel (David Cross and an uncredited Paul Rudd), save Isaac from being sacrificed by Abraham, and finally make their way to Sodom to rescue the girls they like.
Everything about Year One is just plain bad, from the music to the editing to the cinematography.
Endless bodily function jokes illustrate the paucity of ideas dreamt up by Ramis and his co-writers. It’s a situation ripe with comic potential to be exploited, but the utter lack of good material is staggering, as joke after joke and scene after scene die in agony.
But it’s not merely that it’s grossly unfunny, it’s also sloppily executed and incredibly lazy, with many scenes bearing no relation to the one that came before.
The constant references to Cain’s murder of Abel start out amusing but soon outstay their welcome, and everything else is too tame to even attempt to bare some satirical teeth.
It’s marginally better than the similar scattershot approach of the likes of Disaster Movie and its ilk, but then these films are not made by people of talent. The frustrating element here is the waste of gifted writers and performers in a movie that manages to completely squander two very talented comic actors in the shape of Black and Cera. The latter is reduced to little more than reaction shots, while the former is more annoying than he’s been in years.
It’s only really the cameos that inject what little life there is. Hank Azaria and Superbad’s Christopher Mintz-Plasse do their best as Abraham and Isaac, while Oliver Platt raises a couple of smiles as a lascivious high priest. But really, if it’s smart and funny religion-themed humour you’re after, stay in and re-watch Monty Python’s Life of Brian.