The Prehistory Boys

I’m not sure Michael Cera’s shtick will ever grow old for me. Actually, I’m not sure it even technically qualifies as “shtick” — Cera doesn’t so much tell jokes as quietly point out simple facts that seem obvious to him but nobody else in the movie. Most comedy is about upending social rules, but Cera has found a way to make politeness funny — maybe it’s the way he delivers his lines as if he always expects the other person to hit him over the head, even the girls. His characters work so hard to keep their head down and not get noticed, and yet somehow they always wind up in a mess of trouble anyway.

Usually it’s because Cera hooks up with a strong personality who pulls him, against his better judgment, into a crazy adventure. Sometimes, as in Juno or Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, it’ll be a cool, strong-willed girl; other times, as in Superbad, it’ll be a loudmouthed best friend. The new prehistoric spoof Year One belongs to the latter category: Jack Black takes on the Jonah Hill role as Zed, a primitive hunter with big dreams but limited hunting skills who convinces Cera’s meek food-gatherer Oh to join him when the tribe banishes him. Oh thinks they'll just fall off the edge of the world, but Zed thinks there's got to be more to life than sticks and dung.

The rest of the film is a ramshackle Mad magazine-style tour through famous Bible stories, strung together with enjoyable disregard for geography, historical chronology, or logical coherence. Zed and Oh witness Cain (David Cross) killing Abel (Paul Rudd), talk Abraham (Hank Azaria) out of killing Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), and pay an extended visit to Sodom. (“The sodomy here is fantastic!”) They don’t run into Noah or Moses, but you get the feeling at least an hour’s worth of plot tangents are lying on the cutting room floor.

It hardly matters: nobody goes to a movie like Year One for the airtight script. You go hoping the contrast between the Biblical setting, Black the overweight self-proclaimed rock god, and Cera the timid kid next door will generate enough laughs to fill 90 minutes. And it comes pretty close — there’s no way, given a storyline that involves cavemen, slaves, eunuchs, and virgin sacrifices, that an old comedy pro like writer/director Harold Ramis isn’t going to come up with a few decent jokes. That said, so much of the humour is dependent on Cera and Black’s delivery I’m not sure how strong a case I can make for it on the page. (I particularly liked the bashful way Cera accepts Black’s praise for inventing the concept of carrying water in a gourd. “I don’t know... it just seemed practical to me,” Cera blushes.)

There are a couple of gratuitously tasteless jokes, as when Black performs a way too thorough analysis of a freshly deposited turd, or when Cera finds himself having to pee while hanging upside-down in a dungeon — but even those scenes seem consistent with Ramis’ low-key, grunt’s-eye view of history. Everyone, no matter what century they lived in, wants the same things, Ramis seems to be saying: sex, good food, a good shit, a helmet that fits, and those big, musclebound guys in the tribe to quit hassling them.

Unless, of course, you’re Abraham, in which case you’re interested only in collecting foreskins. (“It’s a nice, sleek look,” he says. “I think it’s really going to catch on.”) Hmmm... would that make him a hunter or a gatherer?