The Sitter

How long has this movie been on the shelf? Seriously! If you see Jonah Hill out and promoting the movie, he looks like a svelte, stylish man after losing a great deal of weight (Kudos!). In The Sitter, it looks like he ate the svelte, stylish version of himself along with an entire pizza or two.

The former larger, husky version of Hill stars as Noah - an irresponsible college kid chasing after a girl, Marisa (Ari Graynor), who uses him. So his mother (Jessica Hecht) can go on a blind date and have a fun night out, Noah agrees to step in and babysit the kids of one of her friends. Of course, nothing goes right after Marisa calls him and promises, ummm, "a good time", if Noah shows up at a party with some cocaine. He has been waiting for this moment too long to let it slip through his hands (or pants), so Noah doesn't think it is a problem to bring the kids with him.

How do you score some coke when you have three kids and a minivan?

Will those three kids be too much for Noah to handle?

The Sitter fails because it is caught in between being the crazy, outrageous movie it should be, attempts at trying to introduce some sentimentality we don't need, and becoming too sinister to let us laugh. It doesn't have the right spirit to make us happy to have seen it.

Hill is a charming, hilarious guy with a great delivery that makes many of the flatter, unfunny lines more entertaining than they should be, which is good, since writers Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka don't come up with anything all that original, and try to compensate by trying to be a little naughty, but that doesn't work either. We all want to see Noah and the gang go from outrageous situation to crazier situation, but the pace isn't quick enough and the scenarios are not enough to make you call them crazy nor outrageous. Most scenarios rely on stereotype, even though everyone wants to eschew stereotypes when it serves their purpose.

Then, Gatewood and Tanaka try to make Noah into a sympathetic figure by tossing in some stuff about his mother and father, as well as a lady much too pretty to be crushing on this guy, but it's disposable emotion quickly tossed aside when the two writers decide it is time to make the film more dangerous or funny (yet, they fail to make that happen).

I can't even mention co-star Sam Rockwell, who I think is one of the great actors in the business today, but he's not famous enough to be wasted in New Year's Eve like DeNiro. He has to settle for The Sitter.

The Sitter had some potential, but it is unrealized.

The Sitter is rated R for crude and sexual content, pervasive language, drug material and some violence