Year One
Dir: Harold Ramis
Rating: 1.0
Columbia Pictures
97 Minutes
I challenge you, Internet: think of big-budget Hollywood comedies that are hilarious. Not kind of funny, not amusing, but the sort of gut-bustingly funny that it brings you to tears because it's beautiful and life-affirming. Done yet?
Right. You haven't thought of any because budget is inversely proportional to hilarity. When you make incredibly expensive movies that are also supposed to be funny, you have to tailor your film to the broadest possible audience so people actually pay to watch it. That's why movies like Get Smart and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry are big expensive hits despite the overwhelming number of limp jokes and depressing mediocrity.
Year One is part of that flock of rubbish.
The best praise I can muster for Year One is that it looks expensive, requiring the creation of a number of period costumes and sets to create a comic Biblical epic. Too bad someone forgot to pay for jokes. Jesus Christ, even Chuck and Larry occasionally hit the mark.
Say what you will about Jack Black -- I'm fine with him, but often his persona is a bit too aggressive in that "Look at me, I'm funny" way -- but Year One features enough comic actors to balance the scales, including Michael Cera, Paul Rudd, David Cross, Horatio Sanz, Hank Azaria, Paul Scheer and Matt Besser. How is everyone so grossly misused? How does a film cast Xander Berkley of all people as the King of Sodom yet botch a dozen other things? How can you waste Vinnie Jones?
Harold Ramis' direction is strangely tin-eared and broad -- a step back after his ambitiously dark but flawed The Ice Harvest, but I'm blaming the script by Ramis and Office writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg for this one. The problem goes beyond that their script isn't particularly funny (one imagines they assumed the actors would ad-lib and improve it, and if their contributions are what ended up in the movie then God help us all), but it's not even all that good. What starts out seemingly as a series of extended sketches suddenly inherits a plot by either sheer necessity or studio mandate. The primitive hunter-gatherer episode gives way to the Cain and Abel episode and then to the Abraham episode before suddenly they're in Sodom and they have to save their slave girlfriends from being sacrificed as virgins. A movie has to have a plot, right? The Marx Brothers disagree.
Still, a comedy with a plot is fine, but there's got to be some sort of reasonable threat or danger. We know that Vinnie Jones is a violent hardass with a vendetta against Jack Black and Michael Cera, and that King Xander Berkley is the villain by default... but why is all this happening? Why is there this hubbub about Jack Black maybe being some sort of holy Chosen One? Did someone cut out all the plot points?
Why is Michael Cera the effeminate sidekick? Granted, for the most part Michael Cera can't help but do his awkward milquetoast shtick, but it's deplorable that he's stuck in the role that he would have gotten in every bad comedy film made since America invented the bad comedy film with Caddyshack II. Any comedy from the character comes from Michael Cera being naturally funny, but this sort of role is beneath him.
Year One has drawn some comparisons to the faux-historical comedies of Monty Python, but Life of Brian this ain't. Part of the brilliance of the Python films is how cheap, nasty and gritty they were (to say nothing of the jokes or the manic energy or, God, a dozen other things), whereas Year One is too expensive to dirty up its nice sets or costumes ("Must be a king." "Why?" "He hasn't got shit all over him."). Why is Sodom so clean looking? Why the fuck is this entire film so ill-conceived? Why is this review almost entirely composed of rhetorical questions?
I worry about the Judd Apatow crowd, those revolutionaries of mainstream comedy who made films that simultaneously appealed to me and, miraculously, normal people. They showed that Hollywood comedies could be well-written and directed barrages of jokes that work. They made stars out of nerds and weirdos. They fooled David Gordon Green into making a violent stoner comedy. Films like I Love You, Man and The Hangover, while entertaining, make it clear that the formula -- once a fresh, new alternative -- is now becoming the standard. When Seth Rogen stars in a by-the-numbers romcom it will all be over and we can look to the next crop of upstarts to save us or just let the Robots destroy us because we've irreparably ruined the world.
Is Year One an attempt to make some extra cash or is this a serious comedic undertaking? Considering it's a Judd Apatow production, I'd say something like "Everyone involved should know better," but I pray Year One is a hit. In a perfect world, its success will surely afford Apatow Productions the ability to make more worthwhile "small budget" comedies like Observe and Report. I'd sacrifice a dozen virgins for that.
by Danny Djeljosevic