“The Watch”
“The Watch”
(R), directed by Akiva Schaffer
Now playing
Although obviously purely coincidental, the release of “The Watch” resonates
disconcertingly with the recent occurrence in Florida,
where a self-styled neighborhood watchman fatally shot a black teenager. The
picture actually bases its action and meaning upon some of the apparent
motivations of the accused shooter, most of which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
The movie also suggests just how far Hollywood
now pushes, or perhaps explodes, the boundaries of traditional cinema comedy.
The movie opens with a voice-over narration by Ben Stiller, who plays Evan,
the proud manager of the Costco store in a complacent little burg in Ohio,
declaring his love for his job, his company, his town, etc. When some unknown
assailant murders the store’s security guard, and the local Keystone Kops
exhibit a good deal of incompetence and a minimum of concern, Evan vows to
track the murderer down. He announces at the high-school football game, to a
most unsympathetic crowd, that he is forming a neighborhood watch to protect
the public and find the killer, which initiates the film’s strangely ambiguous
plot and themes.
Despite his appeal, only three volunteers show up to join the watch, each
motivated by something far different from Evan’s expectations. Bob (Vince
Vaughn) believes the group will provide a night out with the guys, complete
with beer, pool, and sports on TV; Franklin (Jonah Hill), rejected by the
police force for several obvious reasons, is the classic wannabe cop, a
repressed mama’s boy spoiling to shoot somebody, anybody; Jamarcus (Richard
Ayoade) hopes that when he responds to a call, a beautiful woman will perform
an interesting sex act for him.
Mocked by the cops, insulted by citizens, and taunted by a bunch of punks,
the four losers, under Evan’s officious leadership, doggedly pursue a number of
dopey ideas and false trails until they actually discover the murderer —
hideous aliens from outer space who travel from planet to planet devouring the
inhabitants. Since nobody believes them, they find they must fight the
monsters, who dwell beneath the Costco store, all by themselves. Their
apparently hopeless climactic battle against hordes of the creatures employs
enough special effects to propel the average science-fiction spectacular.
Naturally all sorts of comical material, much of it more silly than funny,
appears throughout the course of the watchmen’s adventures, but the film also
includes some oddly anomalous subjects for its ostensible form. Beyond the
science-fiction and horror elements, the script exploits some other decidedly
un-comic stuff, like several extremely bloody murders, one of them involving a
kid, for example, and an eviscerated corpse, with a graphic shot of a gaping
hole that the victim’s entrails once occupied, no doubt a first in the history
of cinematic comedy.
The mixture of comedy, horror, and sheer gore far transcends the innocence
of those old Abbott and Costello flicks, in which the immortal duo encountered
such movie menaces as Frankenstein’s monster, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the
Invisible Man, and the Mummy. In another rather unusual touch, “The Watch” also
includes what the ratings people call strong sexual content, in language and
action, including a relatively explicit orgy scene with a variety of sexual
options, including the fulfillment of Jamarcus’s fantasy.
Each of the four principal characters, no matter how dumb and self-deluding,
undergoes something of a transformation through the various ridiculous
adventures, each of course achieving the sort of resolution that the form
demands. Beneath all the obvious material, the movie also exploits such
uplifting subtexts as friendship, spousal communication, and father-daughter bonding.
Amid all the action and the quantities of nonsense, the four principals work
quite well together, each carving out a particular personality and a particular
comic identity, and together they embody the motivations of some amateur
policemen. Ben Stiller nicely portrays a familiar type, the fussbudget
busybody, while Jonah Hill, who now and then overplays, resembles every gun
aficionado who decided to leave his home with Mom and shoot somebody (a sadly
familiar type). The great surprise of the picture, Vince Vaughn steals most of
his scenes, gets the best lines, and delivers his dialogue in an offhand,
rapid-fire manner that seems unscripted and entirely natural; he undoubtedly
constitutes the most entertaining element in “The Watch.”
This article appears in Aug 1-7, 2012.
