Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: The Watch

This is topic The Watch in forum Film Handlers' Movie Reviews at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Stu Jamieson (Member # 4626) on 09-15-2012, 04:56 AM:

The Watch teams up comic mainstays Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Jonah Hill with the addition of Richard Ayoade and with this cast you don't expect much. And The Watch delivers on those expectations with this silly inconsequential story about a group of unlikely neighbourhood watch fellows who fend off an alien invasion. Yes, this is Attack the Block Hollywood style in all it's inevitable blandness.

You feel embarrassed for this cast, knocking out their gags in their respective trademark schticks while the audience looks on in mostly silent boredom; I think one audience member clucked once. Humour is freely milked from those stalwart stereotype favourites: hispanics and gays. Some jokes are downright disturbing. Pictures of our boys posing Abu Graib-style with a captured alien corpse would be embarrassing if it were not so repugnant. And, to be honest, it's getting kind of sad watching R. Lee Ermey repeatedly play these hard-arse army sergeant types for laughs.

The script beats with metronomic monotony with a victim predictably despatched with every bar. It's easy to tell which character will die next at the claws of the alien; they're the arsehole characters that are introduced out of nowhere one after the other. Introduce arsehole #1. Kill arsehole #1. Introduce arsehole #2. Kill arsehole #2 etc. It's all so obvious.

Rosemarie DeWitt is lovely, however, as Ben Stiller's doting wife. She provides some much needed human warmth to the proceedings but her appearances are all too scant to make this film, on the whole, worthwhile.

2 out of 10

Posted by Jonathan Goeldner (Member # 4854) on 10-06-2012, 02:34 PM:

this had so much potential - but what appeared in full film form was unfun and rather pointless... it bored me to sleep in the middle of it.