Tom Long: Film Review: 'Year One' -- GRADE: C-

'Year One' is a sloppy situation comedy

Tom Long / Detroit News Film Critic

"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.

It's not quite a "Land of the Lost II," but it's pretty darn close. The familiar comedy stylings of a couple of stars are dropped into an incongruous situation and the result is supposed to be funny.

In this case, we have Jack Black and Michael Cera as outcast hunter-gatherers who wander into the beginnings of Biblical civilization. They stumble through Cain's murder of Abel, they run from possible circumcision, they party down in Sodom, all the while using words like "whatever" and "dude."

Black plays a clod with delusions of grandeur named Zed who believes he's the "chosen one," even if what he's been chosen for is never quite clear. Cera is Oh, his somewhat reluctant partner and the guy who always seems to inherit the consequences of Zed's actions.

This works out for Cera, who earns virtually every laugh in the film by providing often-mumbled commentary, while Black is doing his usual over-the-top mugging.

Still, "Year One" is pretty sloppy stuff, staggering from situation A to situation B as the guys try to free two village beauties (Juno Temple and June Diane Raphael) who've been enslaved.

Writer-director Harold Ramis ("Groundhog Day") consistently falls back on third-grade, below-the-belt humor. In fact, this is the second film this summer -- "Land of the Lost" being the other -- in which someone's head is drenched in urine in the name of comedy.

By the time it reaches that point, "Year One" has lost what little momentum it had. "Year Two," happily, seems unlikely.

tlong@detnews.com (313) 222-8879