THE SITTER
Stars: Jonah Hill, Ari Graynor, Sam Rockwell, J.B. Smoove, Max Records, Landry Bender, Kevin Hernandez, Kylie Bunbury | Written by Brian Gatewood, Alessandro Tanaka | Directed by David Gordon Green
Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green follows up the less-than-stellar Your Highness with yet another stoner comedy, this time teaming up with another of Hollywood’s funny fat men, Jonah Hill, in a film that is in essence a remake of the Chris Columbus directed 80′s classic Adventures in Babysitting by way of Uncle Buck and Hill’s own uber-hit Superbad. And as a fan of both movies that’s not a bad thing.
If you’ve seen the aforementioned Adventures in Babysitting the plot will be all too familiar: Noah Griffith (Hill) is a slacker, a college drop-out and fantastic at eating girls out… He’s also the world’s most irresponsible babysitter. In fact he’s not really a babysitter at all, but when his mother is set to miss out on a date he agrees to babysit her friends children. Only these are not ordinary kids, these are – as per the old movie cliche – three of the world’s worst kids. However when Noah’s “girlfriend” calls asking him to buy her some coke (no, not the drink) and meet her at a party with the promise of sex, he takes the kids and hits the streets, What follows is an evening of adventure through New York City involving drug dealers, street gangs, gay rollerskaters, explosions, robberies and car chases. Your typical Hollywood night out really.
Let’s get this out of the way first: the UK trailers for The Sitter are atrocious, if I’d seen them before going to the preview screening I wouldn’t have held out much hope for the film – a fact which I think is probably going to hurt the film at the UK box office in the long run. Now, on to my thoughts… I’m a huge fan of Green’s Pineapple Express but felt let down by Your Highness, which tried to recapture the 80s fantasy films with a stoner edge, so I was interested how Green would fare with his take on another 80s staple – the teen movie. As it is, the movie is a hilarious, offensive, and over the top slice of gross-out comedy and a near perfect updating of the genre for todays audiences.
Green and co. really seem to be looking to push the boundaries of the audience with The Sitter – if it’s not the opening of the film during which Hill is eating out Ari Graynors bitch of a girlfriend, or the ridiculously OTT (bordering on offensive) ethnic, gay, roller-skating, drug dealer’s “best friend”, it’s the tiny pre-teen Blithe (Bender), a slutty Paris Hilton-wannabe who overuses both the make-up and the the word hot – whose ambition it is to be “celebrity” and spend most of the movie clamouring for “the club”. However all the boundary-pushing and the gross-out gags cannot compare to Sam Rockwell’s performance in The Sitter. He give the CAMPEST performance of his career as the over-friendly and over-emotional drug dealer whose drugs are stolen by one of Hill’s charges…
Now I may be in the minority here but I think the reason The Sitter works is all down to Jonah Hill, who holds the film together with a superb example of comic timing at its best as he manages to not only outshine all the adults in the move but the kids too – who we all know usually steal the movie in flicks like this. That’s not to say the three troubled tweens in the film aren’t great. In fact the trio are perfect comic foil for Hill throughout the films brief running time – yes, unlike a lot of comedies these days, The Sitter doesn’t outstay its welcome, clocking in at less than 90 minutes.
With a badass soundtrack and a badass performance from Jonah Hill, The Sitter is an unmissable, laugh-a-minute comedy that ranks up there with the babysitting movie greats: Adventures in Babysitting, Uncle Buck and Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. Go see it when it hits UK cinemas on Friday 20th January.
