'Year One': Comedy The Cro-Magnon Way

You might expect, in a movie that alternates gross-out gags with religious mockery, that the latter would be somewhat smarter. But in Year One, writer-director Harold Ramis' latest comedy, everything slides to the same level: exceedingly low and tiresomely unfunny.

Essentially a series of skits, the movie follows an inept hunter (Jack Black as Zed) and a wimpy gatherer (Michael Cera as Oh) as they leave a forest that may be the Garden of Eden. Zed has eaten glowing forbidden fruit that provides him the oh-wow wisdom of a first-time pot smoker — and leads to his expulsion.

Somehow, the two Stone Age pals trudge into Mediterranean antiquity, whose every era seems to be occurring at once. (There's no mention of Jesus, though; it's not that Year One.)

Zed and Oh meet Cain and Abel at a crucial moment, happen upon Abraham (Hank Azaria) as he's about to sacrifice a nerdy Isaac, and then rush to Sodom to rescue two young women. Eema (Juno Temple) and Maya (June Diane Raphael) are fellow villagers and potential mates who've been sold into slavery.

The guys find themselves in a city that combines wicked Babylon and decadent Rome, as well as DeMille's The Ten Commandments and Fellini's Satyricon. Plus, of course, the Three Stooges. Zed flirts with Princess Inanna (Olivia Wilde), while the lisping, ursine High Priest (Oliver Platt) tries to have his way with Oh. Finally, Zed undermines the people's belief in God — or at least in the local god, a pagan deity whose followers probably won't picket outside the multiplexes.

Amid the historical burlesque, Black and Cera play their usual roles — one blusters, the other whines — and speak in the phrases and rhythms of 2009. The incongruity might be amusing if it weren't entirely expected.

Ramis, who co-wrote the script, has never shown excessive gentility; his resume includes such sloppy farces as Caddyshack, National Lampoon's Vacation and Ghostbusters. Even so, the amount of time the movie devotes to smelly human byproducts is a little surprising.

There is a crude box-office logic that argues for such material, as it does for the movie's gay stereotypes. What really doesn't make sense is the money sunk into ornate sets, and the effort made to subvert Old Testament parables. Or the heroic climax, during which Zed tries to introduce democracy to Sodom.

It's as if Year One's makers were taking themselves seriously. But it would take more than biblical pastiches to dignify this predictably juvenile, surprisingly slack parade of poop and penis jokes.