Praising The Watch for having at least a few decent laughs is like applauding the Titanic for having a good band. Sometimes a little of a good thing is not enough to get you beyond the bad – and The Watch has plenty of bad to get beyond. 

The Watch is about a group of moronic adults in such severe arrested development that they make adolescent thugs seem ripe to run for city council.

And yet there’s some hope of success at the beginning. The screen opens up in the heavens, revealing a vast and endless universe where even the most committed agnostic pauses to consider eternity as a viable concept. From here, the camera swoops down to our planet as if in flight of yet another philosophical possibility, that of a lonely planet in search of belonging. It closes in on an idyllic small American town. At the heart and centre of this town is a Costco. At the heart and centre of that Costco is Evan (Ben Stiller), a dedicated man happily collecting friends through clubs and organizations. He loves his community, his family and his friends and takes pride that he has a collection of acquaintances from a mixed bag of racial and cultural backgrounds. 

Then things take a nasty turn and the residents of that quaint charming community start to meet untimely and uneasy deaths. People are discovered horribly mutilated with their skins missing. 

What better set up is needed for suspense and comedy? And what better analogy to express the irony of America’s pursuit of inclusion, than to have a man striving for strength in community and belonging suddenly thrust into a world of hostile alien invasion? 

But we discover about 10 minutes in that the film has no interest in being anything but crass and inane. Another 10 minutes later, we discover the film has little interest in succeeding in that category either.

There was a time when Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn could carry a film on their charm alone. Maybe that’s still true but The Watch barely requires them to walk through this one, satisfied at times to just let them stand and regurgitate lines that probably felt stale even in rehearsal. Jonah Hill’s talent is sorrowfully wasted and what little life the movie has falls, carelessly at times, into the lap of Richard Ayoade. 

Any possibility The Watch has of rising above its material is squandered and wasted on muddled characters caught in an adhesively joined storyline leaving the audience with no more of an emotional investment than might be required to cheer on a backyard water balloon fight.   

There is some amusing prattling about the resemblance of alien goo to the texture, taste and smell of sperm and an open-ended discussion of just how far a character will go to get information from a gun toting curmudgeon. Not unfunny, just too little, too late. 

The film also suffers from bad timing. Recent events turn what was intended to be a hilarious crowd pleasing ‘you-go-get-boy’ moment into an uncomfortable reminder that psychotic loners with hidden arsenal underneath their beds aren’t all that funny.

Director:  Akiva Schaffer
Run Time: 98 mins.
Rating:  0.5/5