First century breakdown

Year One, the latest farce by Harold Ramis (The Ice Harvest), is a tremendous waste.

For one, Ramis - when filming his tale of two cavemen, Zed (Jack Black, Kung Fu Panda) and Oh (Michael Cera, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist), searching for their enslaved lovers in the Biblical Middle East - could easily shoot his actors from the waist down and not lose an ounce of meaning. Anything above the belt is largely unnecessary.

The sheer amount of scatological and genital-based humor is astounding. Not only does Ramis, a seemingly respectable director of Groundhog Day and Caddyshack, obsess over testicles and penises - he goes so far as to detail a set of sheep entrails, just in case it was not obvious enough where the heart of the film lay.

Of course, without the upper part of the frame there would be little to play the bodily functions off of. Ramis seems to be enjoying a constant game of pitting the bowels against the mind. He is the cinematic equivalent of the odd child on the playground who touched dog feces on a dare and enjoyed it so much he continued to do it over and over and over.

Consider a scene in which Zed and Oh, recently banished from their village for their respective lack of skill at hunting and gathering, stumble upon some feces whose owner Zed wishes to track. Black has carved out a reputation as a comic willing to go gleefully over the top and then some. Here, however, he goes under the bottom and then a lot deeper by touching the feces, licking it, eating it and finally concluding that it is "bear shit."

Cera, one of the best young comic talents in film, also falls victim to Ramis and his cohort of screenwriters' pathological obsession with dirty things touching faces. Hung upside down by his ankles for insubordination against the kingdom of Sodom, Oh needs to urinate and he does.

This leads to a close up of Cera's face as fake urine cascades down his body and soaks him. Unsatisfied, the screenwriting team inserts references to urine conditioned hair throughout the script, supremely confident in the belief urine drenching gags - like fine wine - only become sweeter with time.

Year One does possess a healthy irreverence for both history and the Bible. The duo eats from the tree of knowledge and witnesses Cain (David Cross, Kung Fu Panda) pummel Abel (Paul Rudd, I Love You, Man). They even manage to stop Abraham (Hank Azaria, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian) from killing Isaak (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Role Models), although this turns out to be a regrettable decision.

Mintz-Plasse had his moment of fame as Superbad's McLovin' and now apparently leeches on to whatever vaguely Apatow-troupe related project is in production. Here, he even asks Zed and Oh to buy him some wine with the same nasally pleading he employed in Superbad.

This bring us to the film's other well of surefire humor: the GEICO commercial trick of having cavemen say modern-day things. Aside from a few overtly Biblical figures, most of the players speak like especially profane modern teenagers.

The Wedding Crashers-pioneered phrase "eye-f---ing" becomes "eye-knowing." Slightly less clever is the dictum "What happens within the confines of the walls of Sodom stays within the confines of the walls of Sodom." One comes away with the distinct feeling the screenwriters would die happy if only they could churn out a coffee table book of clever things a caveman might say if only he were able to.

Maybe it's because modern plumbing had yet to be invented, but Year One carries with it a putrid stench. After smashing in one's cerebrum with their Neanderthal obsessions, the filmmakers unveil a stoning gag in which an angry eunich throws one of his testicles at our dynamic duo, all the while screaming in a high-pitched voice, of course.

Not only is the gag completely expected, but the viewer is so defeated and brought so low that it is a jolting shock the eunich does not stuff one of his testicles in each character's mouth and force them to swallow.

Those GEICO commercials never looked quite so good.

vmain13@umd.edu

RATING: 1.5 out of 5 Stars