Movie Review: Year One
'Year One' just a silly, summer comedy
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They’re not exactly a dynamic duo, but Jack Black and Michael Cera have chemistry. In Year One, Black has a customary Jack Black role as the troublemaking Zed, a thoroughly useless member of a primitive tribe of hunters and gatherers. Cera is Zed’s young friend, Oh, a wimpy but, by his village’s standards, bright young man who forages with the women while the men hunt.
Year One is one of those silly summer comedies about dumb guys and the trouble they step into. Directed and co-written by comedy vet Harold Ramis, the movie shifts the foolishness from the typically contemporary setting to a historical backdrop, a la Mel Brooks. The filmmakers also bend history to their comic whims, making Year One Cecil B. DeMille meets Monty Python meets Superbad.
Chronology having been thrown out of the window, Zed and Oh literally walk from their cavemen lives to the time of Cain and Abel. Walking a bit further, they stumble upon Abraham just as he’s about to sacrifice his son, Isaac. And the sinful Old Testament cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are a stone’s throw away from Abraham’s desert settlement.
Zed and Oh engage in highly contemporary, gross-out gags during their incredible journey. The bathroom and sexual humor may leave viewers embarrassed at having laughed. Next to jokes about body parts and functions, the film’s riffing off Monty Python’s The Holy Grail and Life of Bryan movies is practically clever. The film is fun, at least until it exhausts the comic potential in Cera’s understated performance and Black’s overstated performance.
Even in their animal skin and fur costumes, Black and Cera play their familiar roles. Cera pines pathetically for a cute cave girl named Eema, played by the aptly named Juno Temple. All the girls love the hunters, he laments.
Black and Cera don’t carry all of Year One’s comic burden. Anyone familiar with classic Hollywood films of the 1950s and ’60s will recognize the Oscar-winning actor upon whom Hank Azaria bases his very expressive Abraham. But after Azaria, Year One nearly drops into the edge-of-the-world nothingness that Zed and Oh’s tribe knows exists beyond the mountains.
Year One, thanks to Louisiana’s film production tax credits, was partially shot in Shreveport, but it may not be something the city wishes to claim.
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