Slashing The Seats

Take a large group of proven comedic talent, and give them a script where characters with modern sensibilities live in an ancient or mythical world. If you do it right, you get The Life Of Brian. Do it wrong, and you get this steaming pile. Proof, if it were needed, of the lack of intelligent design in the universe.

Hunter-Gatherers ‘Oh’ (Michael Cera) and Zed (Jack Black) eat of the tree of knowledge (“hmmm…Kind of ‘knowledgey’ tasting…”) and set out through an old testament landscape in what should be a very funny buddy movie, but ends up being ‘Abbott and Costello meet their maker’.

As they travel from one unamusing scenario to the next, Cera plays straight man to Black, but unfortunately Black has long abandoned actual jokes in favour of shouting his lines in a cod Shakespearian style while rolling his eyes. As if they know it’s a dud, the edit team cuts scenes before the punchline, creating a stop-start film that has gaps filled with knob gags. Now, I’m not against knob gags – they worked perfectly well in Blackadder – but here they’re as ancient as the setting, with any wit or spontaneity seemingly removed in favour of more screeching and a curious and very Middle-American desire to avoid offending anyone.

Bumping into Cain and Abel, Abraham, Isaac and various other Biblical types on the way, Zed becomes convinced he’s on a mission from God, one that involves saving some attractive girls from the king of Sodom. Throughout it seems like there are two scripts at work here, one wanting to take on the Christian right and give Judao-Christian myths a good kicking, the other written by a horny thirteen year old with a short attention span. The whole thing is offensive, but not in a good way. Homophobic and misogynistic jokes are phoned in by an array of talent, all of whom should know better – while the production design looks like it’s been assembled for a high school review.

Another example of Harold Ramis’ spiral into awfulness – this should be avoided like a biblical plague.

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