'Year One' review

'Year One' felt the equivalent to me of being attacked and slapped repeatedly by a childhood hero and then discarded by the side of the road following the brutal removal of my funny bone. It is a film that is not the sum of it's parts, in fact, it's almost as if the equation was designed by someone so mathematically inept that they took the value of each part of the sum, miscalculated it and then shoved the pieces together in a hap hazard fashion. I mean let us have a look at the great components that should have caused this film to shine; Jack Black, Paul Rudd (Whose role amounted to little more than an over glorified cameo), Hank Azaria and of course, the one and only, 'Ghostbusters' co-writer and original 'Buster himself, Harold Ramis.

Harold Ramis, on whose shoulders i have to place the blame for this disaster and that is an accusation that does not come lightly, considering the love that i hold in my young and geeky heart for the inimitable Egon Spengler and the fantastic dialogue that flowed forth from his pen in both 'Ghostbusters' films. But there seems to be no way that this film could have lost so much direction and greatness in it's translation from page to screen; the script just wasn't strong enough. The film didn't seem to know what it wanted to be and this is where its problem lay, one that it couldn't recover from. It was too mainstream to provide a true satirical look and parody of the Bible stories featured within and yet too steeped in Biblical, expositional dialogue to provide mainstream, simple laughs.

Michael Cera was another large problem being that his shtick becoming boring moments into the film, providing us with another docile, softly spoken man child that struggles to get the attention of the girl he likes. I feel like i have seen this character a million times before from Cera and seeing that this film is, in a fashion, a buddy movie and one half of the team is beginning to be, somewhat, lackluster and uninteresting a number of moments into the film, does not bode well. Black was entertaining as always and provided the majority of the few laughs that i indulged within (forced) but he wasn't enough to recover the rest of the film which, seemed to drag for so long, i seriously considered leaving the cinema and going home early. I have never before considered such a thing, leaving the cinema before the conclusion of a film being the equivalent of giving up and going to sleep halfway through sex. It should be seen as a criminal offence and something that would just not naturally occur to me.

Much to my disappointment and sadness in Ramis i will award 'Year One', (award perhaps not being the operative word) two stars out of five and pray that the writing team buck their ideas up before they attempt to tackle 'Ghostbusters 3' or they are going to find a livid, writhing and inconsolable mass of geeks out for their blood.

(I feel the fact that i have discussed the Eighties cult classic of 'Ghostbusters' so much in a seemingly irrelevant review is more a reflection upon the poor quality of 'Year One' than upon the quality of me as a reviewer)

Smylie Boy