The Sitter

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The Sitter

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Noah is a suspended college student, living at home with his single mom. When he is talked into babysitting the three, young, misfit kids next door, he decides to take them along on an attempted sexual rendezvous, and the night takes a wild and dangerous turn for the worse for which he is totally unprepared.

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The calibration is a bit off in The Sitter, David Gordon Green's comedy about a young slacker (Jonah Hill) tasked with minding three unruly children over the course of one insane evening. Green aims to evoke Uncle Buck and Adventures in Babysitting - feel-good '80s family comedies from which the film freely borrows - while indulging in the same hard-R irreverence of his previous two films, 2008's Pineapple Express and April's Your Highness. But the dual impulses prove impossible to reconcile, resulting in a comedy that, while often quite funny, is also wildly uneven. Rarely have I laughed out loud and rolled my eyes so much in the same film.

Hill plays Noah, an aimless college dropout who reluctantly agrees to babysit a neighbour's brood so that his harried single mother might enjoy a rare night on the town. Anticipating an easy evening on the couch, he quickly has his hands full with the dysfunctional trio: 13-year-old Slater (Max Records) is a heavily-medicated basket-case; 10-year-old Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), an adopted El Salvadoran immigrant, likes to blow things up; and 9-year-old Blithe (Landry Bender), is in the midst of a "celebutante phase," emulating her sleazy reality-show idols. Things begin to go awry for Noah when, in the first of several questionable decisions, he opts to take the kids along on a trip to score drugs for his sort-of-girlfriend (Ari Graynor).

As you might have gathered, we've already ventured far, far away from John Hughes-land. And yet Green doesn't seem to recognise as much. As Hill and co. embark on a series of ever-escalating comic misadventures, there's a strange dissonance that pervades The Sitter, which tries to intermingle moments of outrageous vulgarity with scenes of high-grad Hallmark sap. The latter eventually take on a certain comic absurdity of their own: My favourite was a third-act dialogue exchange, barely two minutes in length, in which Noah, newly enlightened by the night's encounters with a drug dealer (an unhinged, scene-stealing Sam Rockwell), car thieves, kickboxers, steroid-pumped goons, and the like, manages to wean one of his charges off his psychiatric meds and cure him of his sexual-orientation anxiety in one fell swoop. Is Green, a former indie darling, bowing to studio dictates with such a patently artificial crock, or slyly subverting them? Either way, it's a futile endeavour.

Hollywood.com rated this film 3 stars.

Cast:Sam Rockwell, Jonah Hill, Ari Graynor, Miriam McDonald, Erin Daniels, Method Man, Max Records, Dreama Walker, J.B. Smoove, D.W. Moffett
Director:David Gordon Green
Producer:Michael De Luca
Writer:Brian Gatewood, Alessandro Tanaka
Duration:100
Official Site:http://www.thesittermovie.com/
Release:In Cinemas Now
Genre:Comedy
Distributor:20th Century Fox