Year One: Critic Reviews

Platt, more than anyone, is the soul of the movie, because he makes even the most
 primitive perversity sound...well, civilized.

A thoroughly, sometimes gaggingly broad and sly conceptual laugh-in.

Year One is scattershot and silly, squandering its potential by relying on juvenile bawdy humor.

A lowbrow, only fitfully amusing comedy.

Any good will the movie generates is grated right back off by Black, whose obnoxiousness has lost whatever charm it once possessed.

Talk about a disaster of Biblical proportions.

Year One has one joke, but it's a good one, played for many variations over the course of an often very funny comedy.

Let's start with the praise because there won't be much: As comedy pairings go, you could do a lot worse than Jack Black and Michael Cera.

"Year One" is the kind of stuff Mel Brooks would have whipped up back in the day -- and, frankly, whipped through in about a half-hour.

Year One is a dreary experience, and all the ending accomplishes is to bring it to a close. Even in the credit cookies, you don't sense the actors having much fun.

Ramis' challenge in Year One, which he wrote with Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, is to keep the vibe loose while delivering the laughs. They come in fits and starts.

Creatively it's a giant step backwards, with Jack Black and Michael Cera playing to the kids as inept hunter-gatherers who stumble across various Old Testament characters.

The actors make a surprisingly effective comic team, with Black's manic energy trampolining off Cera's deflated passivity.

On paper, Ramis and producer Apatow set themselves up for success: The cast is a who's who of funnymen. Unfortunately, the script doesn't give them a whole lot to work with.

Year One is a good short skit drawn out far, far too long, another big, dumb offering to the summer movie gods that is unlikely to appease or please anyone.

An amiable stroll through biblical times featuring Jack Black and Michael Cera as exiled Neanderthals, Year One lacks seismic guffaws but elicits many mild smiles.

Year One is nowhere near as funny as the ancient-civilization movies I saw in high school: Life of Brian, History of the World Part I, Caligula. Its script isn't worth the papyrus it's inscribed on.

Year One is this summer's The Love Guru, this weekend's Land of the Lost.

The jokes are so laden with groaners you almost expect to hear rim shots after every line.

Black and Cera posed in cave-man outfits for an amusing poster. Then the movie was brought forth and things went downhill.

It ambles along uncertainly, hobbled by the lack of chemistry between its two lead actors, and by gags that either try too hard or suffer from being barely there.

Year One is a slapdash concoction with an overreliance on scatological gags and a long lag time between laughs. I freely admit that. Yet I have a certain affection for this movie, if only because of its conceptual simplicity.

An inexplicably unfunny comedy made by two people who have proven they can do much better: director/co-writer Harold Ramis and co-producer Judd Apatow.

Just because the picture's setting is ancient doesn't mean the humor has to be, too.

Somehow, despite the presence of those reliable actors and the highly advanced skills of comic veterans Harold Ramis and Judd Apatow behind the scenes, Year One manages to be a dud.