Movie Review - ‘The Watch’

By Bob Garver

Funny By Acci­dent. That’s a phrase you’ll see if you read enough reviews of bad come­dies. As in, “With this much tal­ent in the cast, you’d think that some­one would be Funny By Acci­dent”. You always hear it as a hypo­thet­i­cal, don’t you? You don’t read many reviews that actu­ally say a com­edy is Funny By Acci­dent. Maybe some­body will say that a cheesy sci-fi or hor­ror movie is Funny By Acci­dent, but not a com­edy. After all, if a com­edy is funny, you assume it was meant to be funny. “The Watch” is a com­edy that I believe is Funny By Acci­dent. Clearly a lot of thought went into gags that aren’t funny, yet the film has a sur­pris­ing num­ber of funny gags that I sus­pect were thrown in with­out a lot of thought.

“The Watch” stars Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, and Richard Ayoade as a Neigh­bor­hood Watch group in the sub­urbs. Stiller forms the group after a night watch­man at Costco is mur­dered (shame, the watch­man has a fun lit­tle role that gets the movie off to a good start). Stiller, the self-declared leader, is a well-meaning dork. Vaughn is a party boy, Hill is a psy­chopath, Ayoade is a wild-card for­eigner. The film knows exactly what it wants to do with Stiller and Vaughn, because they’ve played these types of char­ac­ters so many times before. Unfor­tu­nately, it also means that we’re sick of them. The rel­a­tively unfa­mil­iar Ayoade is a wel­come pres­ence, but it’s Hill’s pow­der keg who steals the show. He’s so much fun­nier than the other three that his per­for­mance rep­re­sents an incon­sis­tency, an acci­dent if you will.

The Neigh­bor­hood Watch is pre­dictably inept at stop­ping crim­i­nals, partly because nobody in the group other than Stiller takes the job seri­ously and partly because nobody in the com­mu­nity takes the group seri­ously. They squab­ble with each other and deal with obnox­ious peo­ple includ­ing a down­right grat­ing cop (Will Forte). These early scenes aren’t ter­ri­bly funny. They get involved in a plot with evil invad­ing aliens, which is fun­nier as they clue­lessly fool around with an alien weapon and a corpse. Then they do bat­tle with the aliens, who have a ter­ri­bly funny weak­ness. Again, I think the idea to give the aliens this weak­ness was some­how an acci­dent because if the film­mak­ers had thought it out, more of the film would have been about exploit­ing it. It’s the type of gag you could watch for hours.

There’s a lot of sex­ual humor in the film, which is admit­tedly both funny and delib­er­ate. Stiller and Vaughn have good chem­istry in a sen­si­tive con­ver­sa­tion. It’s the one time in the movie that their act doesn’t seem tired. Some of Hill’s best lines are com­pli­ments toward a villain’s body. I know I shouldn’t laugh at the vul­gar dia­logue, but I do any­way. My favorite sequence is a mis­un­der­stand­ing between Stiller and his neigh­bor that leads to an under­ground party. Guests at the party include com­edy trio The Lonely Island (one of their mem­bers, Akiva Schaf­fer, directed the movie), and the film’s most shock­ing gag comes at their hands.

The bad news is that Ben Stiller and espe­cially Vince Vaughn are sleep­walk­ing through “The Watch”. Also, I won’t go so far as to say that a lot of the humor falls flat, but the bet­ter gags cer­tainly could have used more devel­op­ment. Frankly the film could have used some bet­ter light­ing too. The good news is that you’ve got the Hill per­for­mance, a hand­ful of touch­ing seri­ous scenes, and a bet­ter brand of crude humor than you’ll find in “Ted”. I guess my point is that a com­edy that’s Funny By Acci­dent is bet­ter than a com­edy that isn’t funny at all.

Two and a Half Stars out of Five.

“The Watch” is rated R for some strong sex­ual con­tent includ­ing ref­er­ences, per­va­sive lan­guage, and vio­lent images. Its run­ning time is 100 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Jul 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.