 DVD Review - Year One
By Paul Furber
The one-liner review on the front cover dares anyone not to laugh. We took that dare but lost; we did laugh once or twice, although it might have been during the outtakes shown over the credits. But there's not a great deal to laugh at during the feature.
Jack Black plays a caveman kicked out of his tribe for eating forbidden fruit. He and a friend wind up in Sodom after being sold into slavery by a bloke called Cain and meeting a guy called Abraham along the way. Can you guess what's being parodied? The problem is it doesn't work. It should work: the cast is top draw and it's directed by Harold Raimis of Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day fame.
 Unfortunately, the script is aimless and filled with far too many fart jokes and gratuitous scenes. Good parodies and comedies work best when there's a story to hang the gags off of and Year Zero doesn't have one so it feels like a set of (unfunny) sketches slapped together.
One of the outtakes has the medicine man trying to deliver his lines, frowning and then walking off set muttering: "This doesn't make sense, let me ask Harold about this." I can't add anything to that.
By the way, we like Vinny Jones as the captain of the guard but we're not fond of Michael Cera and think his voice needs to break first.
In the end, we think that if you laugh at this, you might need professional help.
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