Somnopolis

Oh dear, oh dear. Harold Ramis, Michael Cera, Jack Black, Bill Hader, David Cross, Hank Azaria….they’re all capable of much more than this. (Vinnie Jones, not so much). Which makes it all the more baffling at how poor this film is. With an abundance of fecal jokes, Biblical parodies that are, even being kind, half-arsed and a plot that doesn’t so much wander as stall in the driveway.

Yet throughout I could not escape the impression that this was a 1980’s comedy that somehow only now made it out of the gate. In common with Spies Like Us it attempts to recapture the rambling humour of the Crosby and Hope ‘Road…’ movies. Also like Caddyshack it shares a childish toilet humour, Raimis being the common factor here. Yet this is the man who made Groundhog Day!

I believe this was a script slapped together in a stoned haze sometime after the National Lampoon days. Remaining on the back-burner all these years, maybe Raimis returned to it imagining it to contain some nugget of humour he could recapture. Maybe he just needed to fulfill a contractural obligation and flung this out. I don’t really know. There are frustrating hints of a clever idea here. Zed and Oh seem to live among a tribe of early Hunter/Gatherers, each poorly performing one of the functions respectively. As Oh points out, there are only two jobs. It turns out within the tribe’s territory lies the mythical Tree of Knowledge, from which Zed eats. This combining of evolutionary theory and Biblical myth is an interesting notion and following their expulsion, the pair encounter a host of figures from the Bible that coexist in a kind of condensed timeline – with Cain, Abel, Abraham, Isaac and the citizens of Sodom all lying in neighbouring territories.

Yet Raimis never does anything with this idea, merely churning out old Jewish jokes (’we’re not good at sports’). Cera and Black are stranded, with occasional improvs providing paltry relief from the tedium.

Comedy that goes bad can sometimes be the most disappointing, as its failure leaves little to enjoy. You can’t even spoof a dull spoof! (which is why I hate the Scary Movie franchise)

Bing!