Hola all. Massawyrm here.

Jack Black IS Jack Black. Michael Cera IS Michael Cera. And the audience IS none the better for it. In what is easily the most mind numbingly brutal big name comedy I’ve seen this year, you will delight to everything you love about low grade comedy. Someone will eat a pile of shit. Someone else will piss in their own face. There will be farts o’ Plenty (both in the film and the outtakes as well.) And then there will be callbacks to those jokes later in the film. Oh yes. This is not the triumphant return of Harold Ramis. This is the sad, pitiful career suicide that places your face squarely in your palm and causes you to mutter and sputter in confusion about what the fuck it is that you’re watching.

It’s not a movie that begs for superlatives. It’s just shitty. There’s no merit here, no real laughs. It is a film that made me BEG for the Tenacious D movie. Remember last year, during this same release weekend no less, when Mike Meyers returned to show us all that he actually had managed to squeeze out every last ounce of talent he possessed and had, quite literally, nothing left? That’s this movie in a nutshell. Everyone who has ever complained about Jack Black being a one trick pony and everyone complaining that they’re sick of Michael Cera’s whiny, mumbling emo stammering will find nothing at all to change their minds here. It is exactly like the trailer. Only longer. Much. Much. Longer.

Remember in 10,000 B.C. when those hill people cavemen came down out of the mountains and discovered civilizations they never knew existed? Well, this is the same plot – except that our heroes (Black and Cera) find themselves wandering through several sections of the Old Testament. They run into Cain & Abel. They run into Abraham (just as he’s sacrificing his son). And then make their way to Sodom for a bunch of jokes about…wait for it…do I really need to tell you? Or did you write the jokes yourselves? Yep. Those are the ones. A friend of mine dared to try and compare this to HISTORY OF THE WORLD: PART I for which I almost broke his jaw. This isn’t anything like HotWPI. It is more like WHOLLY MOSES – the super lame Dudley Moore comedy that used to run a billionty times a day on HBO. And lacked all the magic that made Mel Brooks classic a…well, a classic.

I want to believe, desperately, that there is actually a really funny Rated R movie on a cutting room floor somewhere, but that the MPAA gutted it. But, really, I know better. If this had the kind of funny stuff it needed to rock with an R, they just would have released it as an R. But they didn’t. Because they knew the teenagers that ate up MEET THE SPARTANS and DISASTER MOVIE would eat this crap up too – and that was the only way this was going to make money. This thing is dull as a box of spoons and twice as pithy. There is nothing for you here, nothing but the stark, mystifying wonder of how so many great comedians could come together in something that sucks this badly. Even seasoned pros like David Cross, Paul Rudd, Oliver Platt and Hank Azaria seem to be grasping at straws for jokes here. So you can imagine how Black and Cera fare.

A total waste of time, I strongly recommend giving this one a pass at your earliest opportunity.

Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.

Massawyrm

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