Review: The Watch

Review: The Watch

Oh dear.

They had all the ingredients. The recipe was flawless. The leading man Ben Stiller, his long-time comedy sidekick Vince Vaughn, the Oscar nominated funnyman Jonah Hill and British sitcom sensation Richard Ayoade were all thrown into the boiling pot to ensure a scrumptious feast of comic hilarity. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, frankly...everything. 

Comedy spliced with sci-fi has been done before with varying results. Edgar Wright pulled it off brilliantly with Paul in 2011. Joe Cornish also managed to tickle the funny bones and exude some science fiction excellence with Attack The Block. The Watch, however, spits in the face of comedy and grounds it into the dirt with gags that even the American Pie movies would wince at, directing those gags towards the subject of alien genetalia. 

Ben Stiller plays Evan. Wow. Looks hilarious, right?

For aliens are the chief enemy in The Watch, although that doesn't become apparent until frustratingly late into the proceedings despite the film's marketing campaign consistently drawing attention to it. In the early stages of the 102 minute running time, we are introduced to Evan (played with no particular enthusiasm by Ben Stiller), a Costco manager who forms a neighbourhood watch after one of his friends is brutally murdered.

Evan recruits Bob (Vince Vaughn), a middle aged man bored of his mundane suburban existance, Franklin (Jonah Hill), a resident who recently found himself rejected from the police force and Jamarcus (Richard Ayoade), a divorcee whose only ambition is seemingly to get laid. At first the group only use The Watch to sit around drinking beer and slap each other's backs in a typical manly fashion. Later, however, it soon becomes occurent that an alien invasion is imminent upon their planet beginning with their small neighbourhood. Instead of notifying the government or any superior protective authority like a normal person would do, The Watch decide to take the aliens on alone.

The plot isn't exactly hard to follow, and the characters themselves are rather shallow and one-dimensional. A bizarre sub-plot involving Evan facing up to the fact that he is infertile is never really given more than a fleeting glimpse compared to the overwhelmingly frequent fart and urination jokes.

Richard Ayoade brings some, and I quote, 'British balls'.

That's about as good as it gets though. Director Akiva Schaffer, whose previous credits include music videos for the likes of We Are Scientists as well as stints on America's Saturday Night Live shows a complete unwillingness to have any intelligent fun. When the film begins to delve into the territory of character development, it slams the brakes and throws us some more grotesque comedy.
"It's not really irreversible..." Evan says, explaining his infertility to an annoyingly confused Bob. "But it's 2012," he retorts. "Can't you just get a ball transplant?" Oh. Ha. Ha. If female romantic comedies are brilliant at making men look ridiculously stupid (See: anything starring Katherine Heigl), The Watch takes that formula and triples it. A hundred times.

Jonah Hill delayed a role in Django Unchained to appear. Ouch.

As for the performances from the actors involved, the impression that they're simply trying to pick up a bit of extra cash instead of contributing to what could have been a comedy classic is very prominent indeed. Ben Stiller is lacking the enthusiasm of his Dodgeball days, while Vince Vaughn, as usual, manages to bag the sidekick role despite showing no emotion or particularly prominent comic timing. Fresh from his Oscar-nominated success in Moneyball and his hilarious turn in 21 Jump Street, Jonah Hill effortlessly manages to steal every scene he's in despite his character's annoying nature, while British star of The IT Crowd Richard Ayoade does the best he can with a shoddy script void of any intelligent comedy. Funnily enough, The Watch was rewritten multiple times to appeal to an 'older audience' as previous drafts were deemed too immature and too 'teen'. How ironic.

They're crimefighters though, right? There's got to be some action to break up the monotonously bad jokes about balls and faeces and oral sex?

Well, yes, but it's nothing spectacular. Which is fine - this is hardly Die Hard. There is one particularly thrilling scene (probably the only scene worth watching) in which Ayoade gets to pull off some badass slow-motion gun-toting action, but other than that the action is pretty stale. The scenes are nothing we haven't seen before in a sci-fi comedy, and it certainly doesn't come anywhere close to the thrilling excitement of Paul or any of the Ghostbusters or Back to the Future movies.

Redemption surely lies for Stiller and Vaughn in Anchorman 2 next year, whereas Jonah Hill will follow his Oscar-worthy career path and star opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained. Richard Ayoade must be experiencing a wrongfooted first step into major Hollywood acting and can hopefully find himself in better, more intelligent comedic company before long.

Summary

The Watch throws together some of comedy's biggest and boldest stars in the hope that their chemistry will stir up something worth, er, "watch"ing. What transpires, however, is simply an easily forgettable mess of bad jokes, a stupid story and characters so see through you can practically witness the ghosts of the actors' former selves hiding behind them hoping that their past reputations will carry this awful movie.

However, despite its cast of comedy greats, this movie itself is hugely disappointing. Forgettable, pointless, stupid and immature with no satisfaction to be found save from one or two scenes, The Watch is definitely not a movie you want to watch. 

 2/10

See it if you liked: American Pie: Reunion (2012), Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), Meet The Fockers (2004)

By Dean Johnstone