You totally won't hurt my feelings if you skip this particular batch of words and do something more productive with your time, like talk to your basil plant or stare off into space. The film in question today is "Year One," and nothing will be written here that you haven't already correctly assumed from the trailer, which first aired during the onslaught of mediocre Super Bowl ads. Though not without its share of decent yuks, "Year One" is nonetheless a safe, lazy comedy about a pair of inept cavemen who stumble through various passages in the Bible, a theologically respectful undertaking only if the Old Testament were crammed with emo Neanderthals and testicle jokes.

Jack Black and Michael Cera play our heroes, each man balancing the other nicely and infusing his character with exactly what they were hired for. Black is Zed, an arrogantly clueless hunter who, after being banished from his tribe, mugs his way across time and the landscape with meek, sensitive gatherer Oh (Cera), somehow surfacing in the middle of a dustup between Cain and Abel (David Cross and Paul Rudd). Fleeing from the fratricidal Cain gumps them into the path of circumcision enthusiast Abraham (Hank Azaria steals this movie) and ultimately to the city of Sodom (cue anal-sex witticisms), where the randy Zed and lovesick Oh try to save their respective, generic crushes from lives of slavery. But Zed, who earlier chomped from the Tree of Knowledge, might be the Chosen One, so... whatever.

It's fair to expect a bit more than gross-out humor and thinly veiled homophobia at this point from "Year One" director and co-writer Harold Ramis, having had a major hand in comedy classics like "Animal House," "Caddyshack," and "Groundhog Day," yet there's Black carefully tasting feces and a criminally wasted Oliver Platt mincing about as a hairy shaman. (Cera peeing on his own face is pretty funny, however; I'm not made of stone.) And while the "accidental" death of Abel is inspired in its goofy protraction, any director who makes it feel as though a gift like David Cross is overstaying his welcome should probably rethink his choices. Certainly not the worst film ever made, the only surprising thing about "Year One" is that a bunch of people doing what they do best didn't do it better.

Year One

(PG-13), directed by Harold Ramis

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