Year One (2009) FULL MOVIE DIVX

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Review

“Comedy,” Jerry Lewis or some other professional wisenheimer once said, “is a man in trouble.” In Harold Ramis’s “Year One,” a thoroughly, sometimes gaggingly broad and sly conceptual laugh-in laced-with-jokes — about God, poop, circumcision, female underarm hair and the state of Israel — comedy is two men dressed in animal skins and neck deep in shtick. Set in what looks like a succession of B-movie studio sets, the film brings to mind a Hope and Crosby road movie, though only if Bob and Bing, after studying the Bible as children and reading Nietzsche as adults, were grappling with issues of faith.

Filling Hope and Crosby’s clown shoes nicely in “Year One” are Jack Black and Michael Cera as Paleolithic tribesmen. Zed (Mr. Black) is an inept hunter with a wayward spear while Oh (Mr. Cera) is a gentle gatherer who murmurs sweet nothings to his berries. After Zed is banished by the tribe for his blunders, the two hit a surrealistic road that takes them from the forest to the desert with stops along the prehistory and history continuum. Before they depart, however, Zed bites into a golden apple he plucks from the forbidden tree of knowledge, a defiant act that awakens his mind. “Everything is weird,” he declares with philosophical purity. Not long after he is down on his hands and knees sampling human scat.

Everything is indeed weird in Mr. Ramis’s highbrow slapstick, in which theological questions are smuggled in between silly bits about excrement and body hair. Much as Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner did with the 2,000 Year Old Man, Mr. Ramis, who wrote the screenplay with Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, is playing with history, or rather with the serious stories familiar from religious instruction and Hollywood epics. “Is it true that you were at the scene of the Crucifixion some 2,000 years ago?” Mr. Reiner asks the 2,000 Year Old Man. “Oh, boy! I knew Christ,” Mr. Brooks replies. “Thin lad. Always wore sandals. Hung around with 12 other guys. They came in the store, no one ever bought anything. Once they asked for water.”

In “Year One” Zed and Oh keep up a similarly nonsensical running conversation during their travels, which take them first to a meadow where they meet two pastoral types, one of whom has a really bad attitude. That would be Cain (David Cross), who’s soon brutally whaling on his brother, Abel (Paul Rudd). (“You want some of that?”) Er, spoiler alert! Cain kills Abel, beating him to death with a rock. Mr. Ramis stages the murder with so many (off-screen) blows that the scene rapidly morphs from funny to queasily humorous to just plain unpleasant before rebounding to the uneasily comic. Mr. Ramis likes to push humor to its tasteless edge, but the violence here feels almost personal, as if he were wielding that rock.

In some ways that’s precisely what he’s doing in “Year One,” which, as Zed and Oh amble through different historical periods and Bible stories, takes knowing and often profane swats at the sacred. Cain proves to be a real pest (a nice observation on the persistence of evil), and things go from bad to worse. Zed and Oh are sold into slavery and marched across the desert by Romans with British accents. They escape, only to inadvertently persuade Abraham (Hank Azaria wearing a long glued-on beard) not to slay Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Jokes about snipped foreskins and the Holy Land’s borders ensue, as does a trip to Sodom, leading to an assortment of predictable, if unprintable, puns and yuks.

In his 1981 satire “The History of the World, Part I,” Mr. Brooks revisits the past, starting with the dawn of hirsute man and ending with the French Revolution, tossing in some religious broadsides along the way. Mr. Ramis, by contrast, fashions a seamless narrative from Zed and Oh’s adventures, jettisoning the usual time frames associated with these foundation stories to create something of an ahistorical collage. In this film Stone Age man walks alongside Roman centurions and heroes and villains from the Old Testament, which suggests that when Mr. Ramis hasn’t been listening to old comedy routines he’s been boning up on the debate about evolution versus creationism. Riffing on the movie’s title: in the beginning there were multiple beginnings, each good for lots of laughs.

For the most part those laughs are generous, tasteless, groaningly goofy and irresistible, though I wish the filmmakers had resisted the temptation to sacrifice, for an unnecessary gag, a Sodomite priest (Oliver Platt) who had taken a liking to Oh. By that point the film has run out of steam, having mined various B-movie clichés (the kind in which prehistoric women wear eyeliner) and even taken a time out for a discourse on God. I would like to think that the final scene, which finds Mr. Ramis playing Noah and sending Zed and Oh off with female mates, was a lazy afterthought, simply an admission of how the past was written. Here’s hoping that in “Year Two” the Stone Age finally gives way to Stonewall.

“Year One” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Violent sacrifices and excremental snacks.