Year One (2009)
Directed by Harold Ramis
When a couple of lazy hunter-gatherers are banished from their primitive village, they set off on an epic journey through the ancient world.
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3 films that influenced Year One
What critics say influenced Year One
Written by Gene Stupnitsky, Lee Eisenberg and director Harold Ramis, the movie’s obvious inspiration is Life of Brian, but it never manages to reach (or even approach) the manic heights of that Monty Python classic.
Ramis has said that he was inspired by such comedies as Monty Python’s Life of Brian but the movies that I kept thinking of while watching Year One were Mel Brooks’ late-career efforts like Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
Biblical times were milked for raunchy but riotous laughs in Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part I and Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but the well seems to have run dry when it comes to Year One, a disastrous comedy that’s the cinematic equivalent of an old-fashioned flogging.
What he doesn't acknowledge is the film's debt to English comedy - specifically Monty Python's Life of Brian and perhaps a few Carry On farces.
“Year One” keeps the elements simple for Ramis, as writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky script a broad adventure wide open for celebrity cameos, knowing winks at biblical highlights, and constant one-liners -- along the lines of Mel Brooks’s “History of the World” or Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.”
To compare the inane "Year One" to a Monty Python comedy like "Life of Brian" is like saying a Natural History lecture is as thrilling as Raquel Welch in a pelt.
Black's Zed is little more than a horndog riff on Ringo Starr's turn in 1981's Caveman, while Cera barely registers throughout.
How else to explain this blasphemously asinine and crudely scatological buddy pic so obsessed with bodily discharge that it makes Pasolini's Salo look like an episode of Full House?