One more reason to hate the '80s: All the terrible comedies being made that pay homage to that vacuous decade. "The Sitter" isn't as bad as "Hot Tub Time Machine" or "Take Me Home Tonight." It's worse.
This odious, hypocritical movie marks director David Gordon Green's transformation into full-on hack. How did the guy who once made such artful movies as "George Washington," "All the Real Girls" and "Undertow" arrive here? Does money corrupt that quickly? Did the success of "Pineapple Express" suddenly make Green forget everything that once interested him about film? His last picture, "Your Highness," was also a dud, but at least you could respect its ambition. "The Sitter," however, is a crass cash grab, a bottom-feeder entertainment that insults bottom feeders.
Written by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka (this is their first produced screenplay), the movie comes on all cheerfully disreputable. We meet the portly Noah (Jonah Hill) as he's showing the pretty Marisa (Ari Graynor) some "mouth love," an act she's unwilling to reciprocate. When his mother, divorced and single, asks Noah to baby-sit her friends' kids so she can go out on a date, he reluctantly agrees. But he regrets his decision the moment he meets his young charges: The anxiety-ridden Slater (Max Records), the rebellious Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez) and the precocious Blithe (Landry Bender), who is obsessed with becoming a celebrity and talks about nightclubs and partying even though she's 8.
If you've seen "Adventures in Babysitting," you know what happens next: Circumstances force Noah to drag the kids into adult situations, including a visit to a drug den, a robbery at a jewelry store and a high-speed car chase complete with flying bullets. "The Sitter" strives to be subversive and heartwarming at the same time, but it only succeeds at being offensive.
Sam Rockwell plays a gay cocaine dealer who surrounds himself with bodybuilders and roller-skating queens, and Samira Wiley is a former classmate of Noah who enjoys threatening Caucasians with her fellow hip-hop thugs. The movie tries to mine laughs from its mincing homosexuals and scary black people, then excuses its racist, prejudiced stereotypes by making one of the kids gay and giving Jonah an African American love interest (Kylie Bunbury). See? We were only kidding!
"The Sitter" makes a wan attempt to channel the 1980s via name-checking and ridiculously obscure cameos. "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" and "Apache (Jump on It)" are heard on the soundtrack. This movie is so moribund that even Hill, who also served as executive producer, seems bored.
"The Sitter" is too sloppy to even bother to make any sense whatsoever: A kid's cherry bomb blows up half a building, and the impending geomagnetic storm that everyone makes such a fuss over at the beginning of the film is completely forgotten.
Green, whose previous movies all had a nice visual style, can't even come up with a single memorable image. This is a crummy, hateful picture.
Happy holidays!
THE SITTER
1 star
Cast: Jonah Hill, Max Records, Landry Bender, Kevin Hernandez, Sam Rockwell, Ari Graynor, Kylie Bunbury, J.B. Smoove, Samira Wiley
Director: David Gordon Green
81 minutes
Rated R (vulgar language, sexual situations, drug use, brief violence, horrific stereotypes)
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