Movie of the Week: The Watch

"Four men who start a neighborhood watch group as a way to get out of they day-to-day family routines find themselves defending the earth from an alien invasion." IMDb

I'll be honest.  I'd never heard of this movie before.  I don't recall seeing any trailers or advertisements for it, and I'm really not even sure when it came out.  I'm sure a cursory look at IMDb would tell me, but who has that kind of time?  I do, but I don't really care.  So, with all that being said, when I stumbled upon this movie while scrolling through my OnDemand menu, I didn't really know what to expect.  I just saw the cast and figured, why not?  Could be funny.  I was mostly right.

So, I really feel like the filmmakers here didn't really care too much about what the story was gonna be.  I think they just wanted any vehicle to put these four guys in a room and have them riff about whatever for 90 minutes.  I guess the dart landed on aliens.  Anyway, the basic premise is as follows:  Ben Stiller is the manager at a Costco.  One night, one of his security guards is violently murder-splattered all over the store, and the cops don't seem to be doing much about it.  So, he decides to start a neighborhood watch to try and prevent stuff like this from happening.  He puts up flyers, and along come Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, and that guy from The IT Crowd, who all join up as pretty much a means of hanging out, drinking, and tearin' shit up. Along the way, a pretty weakly thought out alien takeover plot starts to form.  Basically they figure out that the security guard was killed by aliens, and they took his skin and are hiding among us in plain sight...we better do something about this! Meh, whatever.  As I said before, I don't think they really cared what the story was about.

You can definitely pinpoint the scenes where Vince Vaughn and Jonah Hill are just making shit up, as if they pretty much just hit record and said, "fuck it, say whatever you guys want!  I'm sure there will be 20 minutes here and there that will be funny!"  I notice this kind of thing now when it comes to these guys, especially with Jonah Hill.  I didn't mind it so much in movies like Knocked Up, but now he does it in pretty much everything he is in and it becomes obvious and borderline annoying.  How about we make a movie with a script?  I dunno, just a thought.

One other thing that bothered me is that early in the movie, before the security guard gets his skin ripped off, they make a point of showing you that he just got a brand new tattoo.  So, I immediately think that it will later be a decent reveal of someone being an alien...cause, ya know, the alien who's wearing the guys' skin will have that same tattoo, probably somewhere weird or upside down or whatever.  It was a clear set up with an easy payoff.  It never happened.  It's like they were gonna do it, and just forgot about it, or it got left out or something.  I guess it doesn't really matter, but it was something that stuck out to me as a misstep.

That really all I have to say about this movie.  It isn't much, but then I wasn't expecting much.  It made me laugh a few times.  There were some boobs in it at one point.  There was some silly Weekend at Bernie's-esque-alien-corpse-prop-comedy somewhere in there.  They accidentally blew up a cow, which was amusing...what else do you want from these guys really?  This was clearly just a nice paycheck for these guys, and they probably had a lot of fun making it and dickin' around with each other.  Good for them.  So if you like these actors and the line-o-rama kind of dialog they are known for, then by all means, watch the movie.  It will at least keep you occupied while you eat a couple of sandwiches and update your facebook every few minutes.