Year One (2009): D-

While one typically expects awful movie experiences to incur only wrath for their creators, the inexcusable Year One stands apart in that the only thing that can be mustered up for the whole sorry enterprise is pity. Maybe Harold Ramis - the sly genius behind 1993's still-overlooked masterpiece Groundhog Day (you probably know him better as Ghostbuster's Dr. Egon Spengler) - needed a paycheck badly, or had simply reached the bottom of his creative well. Whatever the actual case, watching this prehistoric would-be comedy (imagine a braindead SNL take on Mel Gibson's Apocalypto), my first urge was to track down the writer-director and give him a much-needed hug, for so banal and unfeeling is this thrown-together shack of tiresomely contrasting comedic archetypes (though funny in manner, Jack Black and Michael Cera can only do so much with so little) and juvenile biblical anecdotes (if you're not laughing by the time Cain and Able start throwing "suck" around, you can be sure that your time could be better spent) that nothing less than an impassioned declaration from Ramis himself could convince this mind that the man gave more than the slightest damn about this project from conception onward. Black's an inept hunter and Cera an unpopular gatherer; when the former eats of the forbidden fruit and incurs the wrath of the village, both leave the in hope of a better life. The cast hardly seems aware they're in a comedy, lollygagging about as if but waiting for a promised bailout. Already vanishing from our collective memory, let's hope this is but a temporary dark patch for creative forces clearly capable of more, which is to say, anything whatsoever.