YEAR ONE (Harold Ramis). 97 minutes. Opens Friday (June 19). See movies for filmtimes. Rating: NNN
The idea of Year One is kind of inspired, really: a Biblical epic from the point of view of a couple of bit players. It’s Ben-Hur from the perspective of Ben’s stable keeper. Directed by Harold Ramis. With Jack Black and Michael Cera as the stable keepers.
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The team went out into the woods and shot a bunch of scenes with Black and Cera (and several other very funny people, including Ramis himself) dressed up in loincloths and tunics, basically just farting around. Then they threw the footage at some poor editor to be whittled into something approximating a narrative.
Year One is not, by any definition, a good movie. It’s indifferently shot, hap hazardly directed, lacking even the most basic of storylines.
But it’s amiable enough – charming, even – for so much of its slapdash running time that it’s hard to muster up any real antipathy to it. (Okay, maybe Oliver Platt’s mincing, repulsive caricature of a limp-wristed soothsayer deserves loathing.)
The whole thing’s just an excuse for Ramis to string together a series of very relaxed spoofs of 1960s caveman/sword-and-sandal epics, with appearances by David Cross and Paul Rudd as Cain and Abel and Hank Azaria as an Abraham particularly obsessed with circumcision.
It runs out of ideas well before the credits roll, but the cast keeps it sputtering along with idiosyncratic line readings and the occasional head-clunking. And honestly, you wouldn’t want it to be anything more. Then you’d have to take it seriously, and what good would that do?
