10,000 B.C.

How to explain the agreeably bone-headed 10,000 B.C.? Ice Age 2 may be more historically accurate.

As historical fiction, 10,000 B.C. probably is a dollop less accurate than The Other Boleyn Girl and a pinch more on the mark than The Flintstones.

Despite a few scattered encounters with plus-size prehistoric beasts that briefly inspire armrest-grabbing, 10,000 B.C. is mostly woolly bully.

Roland Emmerich's big-budget throwback to prehistoric fantasies like One Million Years B.C. and Prehistoric Women is too dumb to take seriously, but just silly enough to be sort of fun.

Despite a predictable plot and flat acting, 10,000 B.C. manages to be somewhat entertaining thanks to its elaborate production design, cool action sequences, and CGI prehistoric animals.

Although the film may offer up a big slice of prehistory preposterousness (hey, it’s prehistory, so almost anything goes), that doesn’t stop it from being a great deal of fun as well.

10,000 B.C. is movie cheese so odoriferous it made me woozy to watch it. If ever a flick needed Raquel Welch in a fur bikini, this is it.

Special-effects breakthroughs like CGI come at a price. Once the seemingly impossible has been realized, it tends to lose its wonder.

I was never bored nor engaged. Watching the movie feels strangely like being on automatic pilot.

10,000 B.C. has more woolly mammoths than my attic has squirrels, and they have more personality than many of the actors.

Essentially a rip-off of Apocalypto for audience members too young or squeamish to endure graphic human sacrifice and jaguar face-eating.

It's as if all the digital tools of new millennial filmmaking fell into the hands of men who had less storytelling sense than a campfire bard or a cave painter.

If 10,000 B.C. is really supposed to take place in the year of its title, why do all the guys in the main tribe look like the dudes in a beer line at a Rage Against the Machine show?

10,000 B.C. is a big movie whose charms are sadly small and superficial at best.

Say what you will about Roland Emmerich, but whatever his other faults as a filmmaker, he always gives you something spectacular to look at.

It may be the first great comedy of 2008. Unfortunately, the laughs all appear to be unintentional.

Neither grand enough to be impressive nor antic enough to be charming, the movie settles for bland and frantic, climaxing in a showdown among decadent pyramid builders.

Say what you will about 300 and Beowulf, which also were portraits of ancient primal behavior - they both look visionary next to 10,000 B.C.

To recap: bad writing, laughable depiction of history and a positively primitive plot overwhelm fun digital effects, gorgeous nature shots and good-looking young actors.

In 10,000 B.C., Roland Emmerich's tedious, ludicrous and harmless glimpse of the dawn of civilization, we see the origins of modern hair and makeup. The humans have dreadlocks and mud-masques, and so do the woolly mammoths.

10,000 B.C. is further evidence that Roland Emmerich's sensibilities as a filmmaker are more in tune with his fellow countryman Uwe Boll than with the true A-list crop of big-budget adventure directors.

There have been funny movies about prehistoric times -- Caveman and the Ice Age cartoons come to mind -- but for real gut-busting laughs, it's hard to top the ridiculousness of 10,000 B.C.

Roland Emmerich is partial to cutting-edge special effects and stone-age storytelling, meaning that 10,000 B.C., a dim-witted CG extravaganza set in prehistoric times, is something like his ideal project.

There are shaggy-dog stories and then there are shaggy-mammoth stories. 10,000 B.C. is a pachyderm-sized tall tale of prehistoric ardor and tribal warfare directed on an epic scale by Roland Emmerich.

The only noteworthy elements are its computer-generated predators, such as the menacing saber-toothed tiger, and rampaging herds of woolly mammoths.

Roland Emmerich's 10,000 B.C. obviously wants to be this year's 300. Unfortunately, this colossally stupid movie rates closer to a 0.

I had a strangely good time, and whether that is from laughing at 10,000 B.C. or laughing with it I knoweth not, although I strongly suspect the former.

10,000 B.C. is its name. Pre-history is its game. But what I want to know is: Where? On which planet does it take place? Because the last time I checked, pyramids weren't built during the Pleistocene.

There are no laughs, not a one, unless one counts the involuntary titters that erupt over the stolid narration and the high priests with the long Fu Manchu fingernails.

Caveman epics can have dignity, even if they don't care about authenticity. And that specific dignity comes from giving moviegoers a real ride, a "but that was cool!" moment to talk about afterward. 10,000 B.C. tries, but never catches fire...

Anyone expecting a repeat of the action in 300 is going to be sorely disappointed with this bloodless PG-13 adventure.

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.

The best thing that can be said for 10,000 B.C. is that it doesn't skimp on the spectacle. It features so many stampeding woolly mammoths that you'll wonder how they, and not the humans, became extinct.

10,000 B.C. is too stupid to be taken seriously for long. This is, after all, a movie in which men march from the Arctic to the jungle to the desert -- all within a few weeks' time.

There are bad movies. There are hack directors. But with 10,000 B.C., a prehistoric epic that deserves extinction, Roland Emmerich enters a whole new tar pit of crapitude.

10,000 B.C. is a true disaster on every level, a derivative and sometimes incomprehensible mess about a primitive guy saving his tribe through love. Didn't Jesus already do a version of this?

A drinking game based around the historical inaccuracies in 10,000 B.C. -- a film that posits the pyramids were built with the help of woolly mammoths -- would cause brain death before the end of the first reel.

A "long journey" ends three seconds later, rain is called "waters of the heavens" and one baddie tells Evolet, "I like your spirit, but I will have to break it." We couldn't make this stuff up if we tried.

Master of disaster Roland Emmerich’s lumbering ahistorical farce 10,000 B.C. is just Apocalypto redux. If you thought Godzilla was bad...

The mammoths are wooly, the humans are shaggy and the cliches are thick in Roland Emmerich's 10,000 B.C.

Master of disaster Roland Emmerich’s lumbering ahistorical farce 10,000 B.C. is just Apocalypto redux. If you thought Godzilla was bad...

10,000 B.C. is a stunningly ham-fisted paste job of a caveman flick, directed with all the subtlety of Eegah.

If you didn't know anything about this movie but the title, 10,000 B.C., and you were dropped into the theater as the lights went down, you might quickly come to think that you were watching a really funny comedy.

Apparently life 12,000 years ago was nasty, brutish and poorly plotted, and without even any CGI dinosaurs to liven things up.