In a rare swing-and-a-miss, a comedy lead by Jonah Hill completely tanks. (20th Century Fox/aceshowbiz.com)
Woof, what a stinker. It’s not typical of me to completely trash any movie, regardless of who’s in it, what it’s about, or anything like that, but The Sitter has to rank up there (or, down there) with some of the worst movies I’ve seen this year. At the very least, when you look at what the director has done before, and the cast of seriously funny and talented people, it’s certainly up there with the most disappointing.
The flow of the movie was really choppy and sort of nonexistent. But that minor detail aside, one of my biggest problems or head-scratchers with this flick was the random interjections of serious tone. In a movie filled with (attempts of) fart jokes, drug jokes, sex jokes, and other childish humor (which is usually right up my alley), there were really awkward transitions into sentimental, or serious moments with the three kids and Jonah Hill. It’s almost as if they were shooting the movie, and said well…we should get a few tender moments in here, let’s re-shoot in real quick. It just felt forced, and way out-of-place.
Speaking of the jokes…I can’t believe how few and far between the successful ones were. Jonah Hill is pretty much always funny, and J.B. Smoove and Sam Rockwell can carry it on occasion too. And granted, there were some funny one-liners and individual pieces of dialogue here and there, but overall it really just fell flat on its face. It’s all just a shame, for such funny people, led by the men who brought us Pineapple Express, a great comedy, to produce such a disappointing effort.
THE SITTER: 
(out of 4)
Filed under: Movie review Tagged: | ari graynor, babysitting, david gordon green, j.b. smoove, jonah hill, max records, sam rockwell, the sitter
