Okay, I'll say it. I'm jealous of writer/director Roland Emmerich to the point of being vengeful. I mean, here's a guy with absolutely no writing talent whatsoever, yet he has the freedom to make virtually any movie he wants. To put it bluntly, every one of his movies has sucked - sucked hard, in fact. Still, he just continues to be afforded the opportunity to fling his shit at the world like some over-stimulated monkey.
It's one thing to be a producer of shitty movies. It's another to be a producer of shitty movies and a bad writer on top of it. Jerry Bruckheimer may produce a lot of bad movies, but at least he isn't also writing them too. He can blame that on somebody else. Roland Emmerich sucks hard at two things. It just seems impossible that he continues to make films. Actually, what seems more unbelievable is that people actually go see them.
Having said all that, I actually debated not giving "10,000 B.C." the dynamite rating because I expected so little from this film that it actually managed to meet my expectations, which is like getting a red, hot poker jammed up your ass and then claiming that "it didn't hurt as much as I thought it would." I guess you'll have to be the judge whether or not the film sucks as much as my complaining about it. Perhaps I should move on to some evidence.
First, this thing is narrated, by Omar Sharif no less. Unfortunately, that's the screenwriter's way of screaming at the top of his lungs: "I have no idea how to tell a story!" The story has to do with some legend about a dude and a blue-eyed hot chick. The main personal hygiene characteristic of people in 10,000 B.C. is that they still haven't figured out how to come their hair since they all have dreadlocks. They can throw javelins through the hearts of wooly mammoths and they speak pretty good English, but the whole comb thing just hasn't hit them yet. Frankly, I was waiting for the scene where D'Leh (Steven Strait) and Evolet (Camilla Belle) sneak away to the campfire to woo each other with Jamaican love ballads. Alas, not to be. But since it's a Roland Emmerich movie, I'm sure it's on the DVD extras.
To make a long story short, D'Leh's tribe is overrun by invaders, much like the tribe was overrun in "Apocalypto", forcing D'Leh to wander the land searching for them while uniting all the peoples of the land to form an army to attack the invaders. During the course of this mission, we discover that D'Leh can talk to the Sabertooth tiger, kind of like a Neanderthal Dr. Doolittle. He frees the tiger from a trap and then asks the tiger not to eat him and it doesn't. He then teaches a class in tiger communication at the local community college.
Another of the big set pieces of "10,000 B.C." involves D'Leh and his buds, including Tic Tic (Cliff Curtis) being chased around the tall grass by menacing pigeons. As you may well have already guessed, D'Leh follows the invaders to their city, unites all the peoples of the land, and saves Evolet. All this causes Old Mother (Mona Hammond), who's back in Bedrock, to have a seizure and realize the legend is complete.
Actually, as silly as this film is, the worst thing about it is that it's just plain dull. Even a drunk Mel Gibson can do better than this.
