It's guilty pleasure time. Year One is primitive, juvenile, and nonsensical. So why is it so much fun?
Because it's funny, that's why -- compliments of the odd coupling at its center.
It's a broad Biblical-era buddy comedy with jokes nearly as old as the era depicted. But the newly minted comedy team of Jack Black and Michael Cera make nothing else matter but their own reactions and utterances.
Whether intentionally or not, what director Harold Ramis has created is a throwback to the Hope-Crosby comedies of a zillion years ago, where the pleasure came from watching the boys do their thing in larks like Road to Singapore, Road to Morocco, and Road to Utopia.
Year One would fit right in as Road to Sodom.
Black (far right) and Cera (near right) play Zed and Oh, inept Stone Age hunter-gatherers (hey, c'mon, these were the only 9-to-5 gigs to choose from at the time!) who are punished for their carelessness and laziness by being banished from their homeland.
They leave their prehistoric village and set out on an epic journey through ancient civilization that more or less (okay, less) traces the book of Genesis.
True, the central characters do live from the time of Adam and Eve to that of Sodom and Gomorrah, which would take them thousands of years beyond Social Security eligibility, but who's counting? Just think of it as another riff on the Old Testament's greatest hits.
Also turning up in the ancient-world supporting cast are cutups Paul Rudd as Abel (yes, that Abel), David Cross as Cain, Hank Azaria as Abraham, superbad Christopher Mintz-Plasse (you know him as "McLovin") as Isaac, Oliver Platt as the high priest, Bill Hader as the shaman, and writer-director Ramis himself as Adam.
Zed and Oh eventually end up in Sodom, where the Ten Commandments are seen as not-very-popular multiple-choice options. So Z and O fit right in.
Director Ramis (Groundhog Day, Caddyshack, Analyze This, Multiplicity) -- who co-wrote the loosely structured, string-of-sketches screenplay with Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg from his own story -- focuses on anachronistic humor in the dialogue and the behavior.
The writers might at least have come up with an actual through-line narrative that made a modicum of sense. And perhaps something more appropriate and creative than the generic fight climax. But that's just the last reel.
On the entertaining-in-spite-of-itself road to that sequence, however, Ramis throws restraint to the winds, indulges his juvenile streak, and celebrates silliness to a dizzying degree. The obviousness of a joke is never held against the punchline --- and the (PG-13) cruder the better!
That sounds like an indictment, I know, but this no-frills film has a peculiar and pleasurable charm all its own. More consistently amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, the film rides on the comic chemistry of its leads, and overconfident Zed and underconfident Oh bounce off each other adroitly.
Pompous and exuberant Black (the Bob Hope half) provides the perfect comedic complement for the sardonic and deadpan Cera (Bing Crosby).
Besides, actors as contemporary as these two plunked down in a Biblical-era setting is already a risible sight gag before they say a word. And they do say plenty of words, many of them witty.
Produced by Judd Apatow, the spoof pokes fun at religiosity in such a good-natured way that it's unlikely that anyone will take it seriously enough to be offended.
The Hope-Crosby anything-for-a-laugh style is here applied to a script that also recalls Monty Python's Life of Brian, but this offering is far more interested in being slapsticky than satirical. Mel Brooks' History of the World: Part 1 also comes to mind and is similarly hit-or-miss with its laugh quotient.
So, all these years later, we'll hunt and gather 2½ stars out of 4 for the goofy, giggly gagfest, Year One.
It's BC but not PC, not really historical and not quite hysterical, but it's still a glass-half-full hoot.
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Year One would fit right in as Road to Sodom. 
