I can’t figure out exactly when the film “10,000 B.C.” is set, but it’s definitely ancient times. Like before they had cars, guns or tabloid blogs. And definitely before they had cohesive plots or dialogue that made sense.

But at least there were sabertooth tigers, mastadons and togas, and at least most of the people knew how to speak English, even if they did so with medieval Scottish accents. The tribes which were too dumb to have invented English yet speak their own crazy gibberish languages, but at least the filmmakers translated it with subtitles, so we could learn “Agllabogatttarangaba” means “Oh No! I’m being impaled by a sabertooth tiger’s saberteeth!” Which is really helpful.

The movie is directed by Roland Emmerich, who surely must have cheated in making his special effects by using actual footage from whatever time it was the movie was set. I’m onto you, Roland. No way your fancy computers and puppets can make mastadons look so real.

The beasts look more true-to-life than the people, in fact. And are mostly better actors. And have more interesting things to say. But oh well. Complaining about stupidity in an action movie is like whining about wild cherry flavoring in Wild Cherry Pepsi. You just accept it and roll with it, and even try to appreciate it a little.

Watch “10,000 B.C.” with the right mindset and you can appreciate it as a fairly effective comedy. As funny as “Juno,” even. The one way “10,000 B.C.” and “Juno” differ is a small story point. Instead of focusing on a wise-cracking teenager who’s looking for someone to adopt her baby, “10,000 B.C.” is about a caveman (Steven Strait) whose cavewoman (Camilla Belle) is kidnapped (i.e., adopted) by a traveling group of supercavemen who are looking for slaves to build their World Trade Centers.

The one thing these supercavemen weren’t counting on was that three people from a tribe they just marauded would track them down and topple their entire empire. If you look it up, I think you’ll discover similar oversights were made by the Roman Empire and the Giuliani campaign.

The funniest part of the movie involves a witch doctor lady who sits in Dhalsim’s Yoga Flame pose and channels the emotions, sights and sounds of the heroes’ journey, flipping out whenever they encounter an enemy or recite painful dialogue. Why she does this I’ll never know. Maybe because this was before the days of DVD back then and all they had was VHS, which were such a hassle because they’d wear out too easily and if you didn’t rewind the tapes before you brought them back to Blockbuster you’d get charged an extra dollar. Plus the picture quality sucked.

The picture quality in “10,000 B.C.” on the other hand, is excellent. Beautiful, even. The only problem is whenever it talks, you get really annoyed and want to cover your ears and scream for it to stop. Just like Nanny from that TV series “The Nanny.” The only real problem in the movie is they forgot to put dinosaurs in. But oh well. Overall the movie isn’t that bad for a bunch of cavemen, who were much stupider than all of us living today. 2.5 stars out of 4.