This review was originally published in UAB's Kaleidoscope on August 2nd, 2012.
The Watch is one of those films that should be a no-brainer at the box office, effortlessly raking in the cash…if this were the 80's. I don’t necessarily mean that as an insult, so much as to say that it seems imported in from that time, minus all the obvious trappings (i.e. period clothes, music, etc.).
It’s basically Ghostbusters redux with aliens instead of ghosts. Plus, lots of cursing and vulgarity in general. You can almost smell the fun, right? Or maybe you're smelling something else less favorable...
Ben Stiller, as ever, just plays a variation of himself, here a low-key suburban nebbish who manages a Costco and, as tends to be the case in movies like this, is married to an inexplicably hot wife- here played by the exceptionally-talented Rosemarie DeWitt (Mad Men), who is completely wasted in the film, naturally.
When the night watchman at the store is gruesomely murdered, Stiller announces he’s forming a neighborhood watch to catch the killer and keep the streets safe. Only a handful of people show up, essentially just guys looking for an excuse to goof off and drink and, if they happen to run into troublemakers… so be it, but it’s not exactly a prerequisite, it’s more of an added bonus.
The group is comprised of: Bob (Vince Vaughn), a frustrated dad struggling with a teen daughter who just needs to blow off steam, while hopefully keeping an eye on his daughter in the process; Jamarcus (Richard Ayoade, best known to American audiences from the surreal Brit-com The Mighty Boosh), a British bloke new to the area looking to make new friends; and Franklin (Jonah Hill), a hot-headed guy armed to the teeth who still lives with his mother and clearly has unresolved anger issues.
The crew inadvertently stumbles upon an alien, which they manage to subdue and bring home in one of the funniest scenes. Eventually, they expose a plot in which his alien brethren will soon be coming to join the aliens that are already among us to take over the planet. Naturally, it’s up to the Watch to stop their nefarious plans. Would-be hilarity ensues.
The script is from the Superbad team of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, with an assist from Jared Stern, best known for his work on kid’s movies like Mr. Popper’s Penguins. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that he probably wasn’t responsible for the orgy scene. Or maybe he is- you never know. Sometimes these people snap and go completely in the opposite direction.
In the director’s chair is Hot Rod-helmer Akiva Schaffer, of The Lonely Island and SNL fame. The Lonely Island themselves also cameo in the film in…you guessed it, the orgy scene.
While the film is competently directed and written, there’s a certain art-less-ness to the proceedings that has started to creep into all such movies nowadays. When Kevin Smith hit the scene with Clerks in the early 90's, he sort of set into motion- likely without meaning to- the use of excessive vulgarity in mainstream film, which continued with the likes of the Farrelly Brothers and Judd Apatow’s films.
The thing that set Smith’s work apart from other filmmakers wasn’t so much the cursing as the surprising well-crafted way he fashioned it into dialogue while still retaining a heart underneath all the crudity. It was almost like Woody Allen’s foul-mouthed cousin was doing the writing, and it worked like gangbusters for a while, if a bit under the radar.
The Farrellys upped the schmaltz considerably for their hit-and-miss flicks with some success, but it was Apatow and his extended group of conspirators that really cracked the code in a big way with the enormous success of The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up.
As with all people who hit it big, a slew of inevitable imitators followed, and by now, the field has become ridiculously crowded with wanna-bes, none of which come close to the original source that spawned it all, the aforementioned Mr. Smith.
(Smith, who has slowly-but-surely stepped back from film-making, is currently raising potty-mouth talk to new heights via his army of podcasts on the Smodcast network, which can be found on iTunes and are well worth a listen, with a different show with a different theme for each day of the week.)
The way Smith crafted his work seems near-Shakespearian in comparison to some of the dreck clogging up the screen these days. I hate to break it to these people, but you can’t just flood the screen with cursing for cursing’s sake and expect people to automatically laugh. It takes a certain touch to make that sort of thing funny, and it’s becoming less so in recent years, even amongst the Apatow clan.
Sadly, The Watch is a perfect example of what happens when what should be an easy slam dunk misses by a mile. There are a few funny moments here and there, but on the whole, it’s just overkill, even to the point of some of the violence being gasp-inducing for no apparent reason (think Pineapple Express).
This could have been an easy sell to a younger crowd, if they’d just toned down the cursing and violence, but all comedies seem to go one of two routes these days: cheesy romantic comedies and frat-guy friendly curse-a-thons. Guess which one this is?
I’m certainly no prude, but there has to be a better way. Or at least a road-less-traveled approach that stands out among all the same-y comedies we’ve been subjected to over the last few years.
As such, I can’t in good faith recommend The Watch as worth anything but a rental or for cable viewing at best. It’s not the worst of the worst- for that, I’d have to go with either Good Luck Chuck or The Switch- but it’s no great shakes either.
It’s too bad, as there’s a germ of a funny movie in The Watch, but for real laughs, I’m afraid you’ll need to watch... something else.
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