Remember when “Year One” was a ooh, “secret” project that no one knew anything about and we all tried to figure it out? It’s amazing how keen producers can make something seem special and enticing when you just don’t know how spectacularly numbskulled and dreadful a project can be. Congenially innocuous to a fault, this brainless and bumbling idiots-travelogue is even dumb laughs and entertainment-challenged. It’s greatest crime is just how simpleminded and unfunny it all is.
To spend too much time discussing it is a waste of oxygen, energy and time. And”Year One” is so insultingly piss-poor, dull and cheaply slapped together it immediately makes three things immediately clear and augurs poorly for an upcoming highly-anticipated project: One, although Judd Apatow feels only loosely, loosely associated (it feels like offhanded endorsement of his name for his friend, director Harold Ramis) it becomes another blemish on his track-record and perhaps the worst Apatow-related project since “Drillbit Taylor”) Two: it almost kills the prospect of “Ghostbusters 3” dead and stumps out the cache of Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky quickly (the duo are scribes for “The Office” and rather “hot” in Hollywood at the moment, lord now knows why).
The “plot” is rail thin: two moron hunter and gatherers in ancient time are exiled from their tribe for their wanton ineptness and stupidity and soon they wander off and enjoy half-baked adventures that take them through stories of the Bible (Cain & Abel, Abraham & Issac, Sodom & Gomorrah). While Jack Black & Michael Cera veer off script at every painful opportunity, the final film product illustrates just how toothless and silly the pointless endeavor was from a screenwriting perspective (the original script was light fun, but empty headed). It also should kill Harold Ramis chances at directing “Ghostbusters 3” effective immediately, as the messy, slapdash execution gives even dim-witted low-brow comedy a bad name. Much like “Land Of The Lost,” only cheaper, “Year One” should easily split its audience and end up an film for no one, aside for fans of Straight To Video endeavors by Rick Moranis in the well-past-his-prime phase. Too harmless to have an inch of bite, the already fence-sitting R-Rated crowd (who loved “The Hangover”) likely will avoid this blathering nonsense like a case of crabs, and the PG13 crowd will probably sneak into Todd Phillips fratcom once again or simply stay home and play video games instead.
Idiotic on multiple levels, the ill-conceived time-waster is foolhardy, nitwit humor that provides mostly eyeroll inducing chortles of disbelief (never-ending fart jokes? Nipple twisters? Really? Is that what it comes down to these days? ). Jack Black, who can skew intolerable far more than most care to admit, helps dumb down the proceedings all the more, doing his self-satisfied shtick with an awful improv-gone-wrong approach at its worst. Michael Cera does, what else, Michael Cera (naturally), in B.C. times with loincloth and wig, but try as he admirably may, his acute observations about the mundane mostly fail to provide laughs and feel like riffing on B-list material while the cameras roll. Fun for him and Black to be sure, wincingly trivial for us.
Poor avuncular Harold Ramis, who seems like the sweetest of Hollywood people, genially directs with a smileyface, carefree attitude that screams, “Sure, do whatever you want!” Or “hey, it’s a dumb comedy, it’s good enough! Just have fun, guys!” No one is expecting high art, but there’s some really glaring continuity errors that detract all the more from the overall hammy, cornball excuse for a comedy (we saw more than a few critics leave, one we know fell asleep). Ramis has been away from the director’s chair for some time and this broad as a barn picture is strong evidence why he should stay there.
Relative newcomer June Diane Raphael provides little aside from pretty blue eyes and the two other females — Juno Temple and Olivia Wilde– are just requisite female stand-ins who earned paychecks and had a nice film vacation. Apatow players like Paul Rudd, Christopher Mintz-Plasse (dear god, stop casting this incredibly poor and unremarkable actor, its not even remotely funny anymore), and Bill Hader all phone in their mostly unscripted cameos while David Cross does his best to elevate the material and doesn’t embarrass himself much. He’s probably the “best” thing about the picture if you can speak of the goofball trifle in such ways. Oliver Platt queenily hams it up as much as humanly possible. Hank Azaria is the only one who really attempts to speak in “Olden Times” biblical-era vernacular, because who else really gave a shit, right?
Anyone with a half a brain not drunk on dangerous nostalgia can tell you “Ghostbusters 3” is a terrible idea and if “Year One” is supposed to showcase the core creative team on the project then even cineplex mouthbreathers are in deep deep trouble (Ramis wrote the story idea with “The Office” kids; over-invested Dan Aykroyd’s three miserable attempts of writing ‘G3’ presumably earned him a barring from the writer’s room). Fanboys should just hope Bill Murray doesn’t receive a copy of this aggressively middling biblical farce or they’re all as screwed as that project is. [C-]