"10,000 B.C." is the kind of B-movie cheese that used to make Saturday matinees such sticky, noisy fun, as audiences thrilled to the sight of superhuman heroes battling otherworldly creatures in faraway places. Today, we must make do with the likes of action director Roland Emmerich, who takes the time-honored Hollywood tradition of spectacle, overkill and narrative absurdity and manages to zap almost all the fun out of it.

The problem is that Emmerich ("Independence Day," "The Day After Tomorrow") takes himself way too seriously in "10,000 B.C.," in which a gentle prehistoric hunter-gatherer played by Steven Strait finds his inner warrior. One part Joseph Campbell hero quest, one part multi-culti morality tale, one part live-action "Flintstones" cartoon, "10,000 B.C." is finally every part just plain nuts, from a hike featuring more ecosystems than an Al Gore documentary to a wacky climax set amid pyramids that -- you'll e-mail me if I'm wrong -- wouldn't have been built for another 7,000 years or so.

Strait plays D'Leh, a member of a mountain-dwelling tribe that depends for sustenance on an annual hunt for the giant woolly mammoth (which no "Ice Age" fan will see without superimposing the sad-eyed visage of Ray Romano).

When D'Leh manages to fell the biggest mammoth of 'em all, he wins the hand of Evolet (Camilla Belle), a blue-eyed beauty who was adopted by the tribe as a child. When a band of warlords invades their settlement, making off with Evolet and a boy named Baku (Nathanael Baring), D'Leh and master hunter Tic Tic (Cliff Curtis) set off on -- what else? -- an epic journey during which D'Leh will be tested in strength, devotion and how much he can look like a cross between Bob Marley and Jack Sparrow.

-- Ann Hornaday (March 7, 2008)

Contains sequences of intense action and violence.