Add ‘Year One’ to list of Biblical Plagues

Right after “rain of frogs” and “swarm of locusts” on the list of biblical plagues, add “Year One,” a crassly juvenile spoof of the Old Testament that’s sure to be a pox on its creators and its audiences alike. Theater owners are advised to smear some lamb’s blood on their doors until this blight passes.

Jack Black and Michael Cera star as Zed and Oh, two cavemen who are banished from their tribe for their lack of skills as, respectively, a hunter and a gatherer. And because Zed ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, which was forbidden, and also apparently failed to make him any smarter.

The structure of “Year One” is painfully minimal, existing only to tack on jokes that seem to have been made up on the spot — and if you’ve ever endured an evening of improv comedy, you know that formula winds up delivering lots of misses for every rare hit. Ramis and co-writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg mostly avoid the easy anachronism jokes, to their credit, but instead they wind up plumbing the depths of poop, fart, urine, foreskin and gay-panic humor.

Since Zed is a loudmouth braggart and venal coward, while Oh is a mealy-mouthed doormat, one assumes that Ramis was shooting for some sort of Hope & Crosby/Abbott & Costello—type interplay, but instead we wind up with Black and Cera playing pretty much the exact same characters they portray in practically every movie they make.