'Year One': A Movie That Makes You Wonder What Happened

Year One: How do you put Jack Black and a bunch of other reasonably funny people together and wind up with...this? Sony/Columbia Pictures

 

by Linda Holmes

I almost walked out of Year One about five minutes into it. Five minutes, no kidding. It wasn't something I had to see, and its lifelessness was so aggressive that it was very hard to believe it was going to get better.

It didn't. And it raises a question, which we'll come back to.

Later, walking out at the actual end of the movie, these are the two comments I overheard: (1) "Those were the longest 97 minutes of my life." (2) "I would have been so much madder if I had paid to see that." (It was a preview audience.) Note that these are not your average "That stunk" comments.

You can tell a lot from its very few "positive" reviews. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, who made this a "Critic's Pick," quotes two lines from the movie: "Everything is weird" and "You want some of that?" ...Hilarious? She spends significantly more time quoting Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks.

(Incidentally, Dargis' use of the word "highbrow" to describe a movie that relies this heavily upon poop jokes and unceasing gay-panic humor is an instant classic.)

Or here, David Hiltbrand of the Philadelphia Inquirer describes a representative scene:

The itinerants are constantly being forced into bondage. At one point Zed, explaining his reluctance to trust Cain, says to him, "You did sell us into bondage." "Hold a grudge much?" responds the king of fratricide. "That was like a fortnight ago."

Yes. Yes, that is exactly what the movie is like. The movie is like that, for an hour and a half. You see, David Cross is playing Cain, who's from Biblical times, but he says stuff like "Hold a grudge much?" This is where you're supposed to laugh hysterically.

Wondering why, after the jump...

Jack Black and Michael Cera are at their worst, both playing nothing but their most overexposed tics. Cera, in particular, is a trickier screen presence than he seems to be -- yes, he's always hangdog and deadpan, but in Juno and Superbad, and especially in Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist, he cuts all that with enough intelligence that he doesn't just seem whiny and passive, like he does here.

The number of people who are capable of being really good who are wrapped up in this project is really surprising. It's produced by Judd Apatow, and the script came from director Harold Ramis and the writing team of Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky (who work for The Office). In addition to Black, Cera and Cross, the cast includes Hank Azaria, Oliver Platt, and -- for fleeting moments -- Bill Hader and Paul Rudd.

It's kind of mind-blowing. By about halfway through the movie, I found myself consumed by the question, "How did this happen?"

You have a script, you have rewrites of the script, you have shooting, you have editing...does nobody notice it isn't funny? Did they realize at some point that it wasn't funny, but by then it was too late?

(Roger Ebert, who saw the movie basically as I did -- one star isn't an everyday "didn't care for it" rating -- wonders the same thing and speculates that Ramis made the script seem funny when he read the lines himself.)

Yes, yes, you can be very cynical and say something about the lowest common denominator and the profit motive and no one cares about quality, but nobody intentionally makes a comedy that people are going to walk out of saying, "I would have been so much madder if I had paid to see that." Harold Ramis is Harold Ramis, and Eisenberg and Stupnitsky are talented, and this is their first movie. Nobody intended this result.

It makes for an interesting lesson. I stayed after the first few minutes, hoping it was going to get better. Perhaps the people who made it were equally hopeful.