Hill's 'Sitter' is really not worth sitting through
Source: Agencies |
December 9, 2011, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
JONAH Hill, world's worst babysitter. Must have sounded like such movie magic that the makers of "The Sitter" grabbed the first three brats they found on the street, shoved them in a minivan with Hill and started filming.
As broad, dumb comedy goes, it's not a bad idea to cast Hill as a chubby slacker roped into a hellish night tending to a high-maintenance brood. Yet other than Hill's admirable work ethic trying to squeeze laughs out of this dismally underdeveloped scenario, "The Sitter" is a dud. Not even its fleeting length. Take away the opening and closing credits, and you're left with not much more than an hour of actual movie. But it feels much, much longer, watching "The Sitter" slog along from one rotten gag to the next.
The movie's also a serious racial offender, parading a gang of black actors around as hoods stealing cars, talking jive or looking for a fight.
Director David Gordon Green - who started as an indie-film prodigy with such small, smart dramas as "George Washington" and "All the Real Girls" before going Hollywood with the 2008 hit "Pineapple Express" - delivers his second bad, raunchy comedy of the year, after last spring's "Your Highness."
He's single-handedly jeopardizing the goodwill R-rated comedy has gained in Hollywood from such dirtier-minded hits as "Bridesmaids," "Bad Teacher" and others in the Judd Apatow mold.
Apatow protege Hill, who leaped from a bit part in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" to stardom in "Superbad," plays Noah Griffith, an idler kicked out of college, living with his divorced mom and whiling away his time. His mother guilts him into taking a babysitting job for family friends, and from there, the merry mayhem is supposed to take off.
It's all just muck from then on, except for an occasional throwaway line that's worth a chuckle. Screenwriters Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka's verbal jokes are mostly mindless, though, and "The Sitter" really fails in the physical comedy department with an assault of mean, humorless sight gags.
Advice to parents, and everyone else, looking for some decent entertainment to babysit your eyeballs for a while: don't hire "The Sitter."
As broad, dumb comedy goes, it's not a bad idea to cast Hill as a chubby slacker roped into a hellish night tending to a high-maintenance brood. Yet other than Hill's admirable work ethic trying to squeeze laughs out of this dismally underdeveloped scenario, "The Sitter" is a dud. Not even its fleeting length. Take away the opening and closing credits, and you're left with not much more than an hour of actual movie. But it feels much, much longer, watching "The Sitter" slog along from one rotten gag to the next.
The movie's also a serious racial offender, parading a gang of black actors around as hoods stealing cars, talking jive or looking for a fight.
Director David Gordon Green - who started as an indie-film prodigy with such small, smart dramas as "George Washington" and "All the Real Girls" before going Hollywood with the 2008 hit "Pineapple Express" - delivers his second bad, raunchy comedy of the year, after last spring's "Your Highness."
He's single-handedly jeopardizing the goodwill R-rated comedy has gained in Hollywood from such dirtier-minded hits as "Bridesmaids," "Bad Teacher" and others in the Judd Apatow mold.
Apatow protege Hill, who leaped from a bit part in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" to stardom in "Superbad," plays Noah Griffith, an idler kicked out of college, living with his divorced mom and whiling away his time. His mother guilts him into taking a babysitting job for family friends, and from there, the merry mayhem is supposed to take off.
It's all just muck from then on, except for an occasional throwaway line that's worth a chuckle. Screenwriters Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka's verbal jokes are mostly mindless, though, and "The Sitter" really fails in the physical comedy department with an assault of mean, humorless sight gags.
Advice to parents, and everyone else, looking for some decent entertainment to babysit your eyeballs for a while: don't hire "The Sitter."
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