10,000 B.C.
Call it Apocalypto for pussies — a PG-13 rating, puh-leese! — or prehistory for peabrains. Just don’t call it friendo. 10,000 B.C. will take your money, rob your time and hit your brain like a shot of Novacaine. The best acting comes from woolly mammoths, man-eating ostriches and a saber-toothed tiger — and those babies are digital. It’s the human actors who look fake. Steven Strait, a model turned something less than an actor, as D’Leh, a hero in dreadlocks that look borrowed from the kid who sang “Hallelujah” on American Idol. D’Leh loves Evolet, played by Camilla Belle, who is made up and muscle-toned like the attraction on America’s Next Top Lifeless Mannequin. Director Roland Emmerich, who wrote the deadly dull script with Harald Kloser, expects us to care if D’Leh will prove his manhood by saving Evolet from rapacious captors, saving his tribe from slavery and saving all mankind from a deity obsessed with building pyramids in his own honor. Emmerich, who hit it big with Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow and hit the skids with Godzilla, skids even lower with this gargantuan gasbag of an epic. The biggest sin is that Emmerich doesn’t even have fun with this twaddle. Raquel Welch at least wore a fur bikini in 1966’s guilty pleasure, One Million Years B.C. All we get here is pompous narration from Omar Sharif, psychobabble dialogue spoken in California English, and bloodless, bloody boring action. Emmerich may be trying to resurrect the past in all its primitive glory, but his movie buries it in banality.
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