Gamercyrus’s Blog

Black and Cera, a great comedy team

Jack Black & Michael Cera play as two members of a primitive tribe of hunters and gatherers who are exiled for eating some forbidden fruit.

As the title suggests, Year One takes you back to a simpler time where humans were crude in behavior and religion and God took centre stage in everyday life.

The plot is simple. The two lead actors, Jack Black and Micheal Cera are two primitive tribe members named Zed and Oh, who are seeking for something grander to life than just hunting and gathering.

The movie is one biblical joke after another. Zed and Oh get in trouble after Zed decides to eat some of the forbidden fruits and are exiled from the tribe.

The plot then follows the two banned stone-aged men as they search for a higher purpose, following spoofs of biblical stories such as Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, the story of Moses and Israelites, and a city called Sodom where virgin sacrifices are made to the gods.

Eventually the two come across several of their once fellow tribe members captured and forced to be slaves. Zed and Oh reunite with a couple beautiful women from their old tribe and set out on a mission to rescue them and the premise for the rest of the movie follows this.

The plot barely has any cohesiveness to it because each of following scenes is really just a different setting and a different biblical stereotype to dish jokes from. But in a movie like this there isn’t much need for anything more.

Depending on your threshold for gross-out jokes, Year One may end up over stepping what is tolerable. It is clear from early on that this movie intends to dish out one disgusting joke after another. It reaches the breaking point when one of the characters decides feces are something you should eat.

These gross out moments will be the deciding factor for many as it goes well behind the antics of what has been done in the past with movies.

That being said, this movie is ridiculously funny at times and treads closely to having just enough toilet humour without being too much, but again that could be a matter of preference to some.

The comedy pairing of Black and Cera is very smooth as the two have great chemistry in playing to each other’s comedic strengths. Constantly Cera’s character gets the short end of the stick and is tortured, mauled and forced to do some very unpleasant things. In fact, Cera’s shy yet babbling witty personality works so well that he upstages Black’s performance as the funniest element to the movie.

There are some scenes with Black that seem as if he decided to forego the script and improv his own jokes. These lines don’t make much sense and are quite awkward, leaving parts of the movie disjointed.

Other than those few instances, Black sets out to tickle your funny bone as the way you expect him to. He is cocky, foolish and dumb so he doesn’t veer off much from his style of comedy and this means some of the punch lines are quite dated and over used.

You will also see the standard fart jokes, women bashing, sexual connotations and just plain stupidity that has been played out in so many other movies like Dumb and Dumber or Land of the Lost.

This movie is not intelligently funny, but the comedy work from Black and Cera does make this movie worth while to see if you’re into gross and stupid humour. Overall it’s a decent predictable story that has its moments of greatness and utter embarrassments.

3 Stars

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