Simultaneously subverting and celebrating several genres of he-man testosterone flicks, from horror to buddy action flick, to, heaven help us, the existential suburban angst of John Updike, THE WATCH does what a good synthesis should. It becomes more than the sum of its parts, inviting the audience in on the joke, and then taking that joke and making it even funnier by using well-worn idioms and tropes as building blocks for satire may not be of the most sophisticated type, but is screamingly funny nonetheless.
The titular watch is started when a newly minted American citizen is slaughtered during his shift as a night watchman at that perfect symbol of American consumerism and complacency, Costco. The branchs manager, Evan (Ben Stiller), a civic booster par excellence of his small town, pledges to find the killer by founding a neighborhood watch. Alas, his heartfelt plea for volunteers nets him exactly three who are not so much looking to keep the peace as to do some male bonding. They include a switchblade flicking police reject (Jonah Hill) who wants to work through his issues with the group; a loud-mouth (Vince Vaughn) with the blessings of a miracle of a man-cave and a winsome nymphet of a teenage daughter, and a perky mop-haired Brit (Richard Ayoade) with heavy horn-rims, lovely manners and a very specific fantasy life. With no respect from the local cop (Will Forte), and a serial killer on the loose, the four forge common ground as the situation gets more peculiar, and their personalities threaten to tear them apart.
The greatest pleasure of this film is not the acrobatics of the clever dialogue, as it pirouettes and pratfalls its way through a plot that wears its essential ridiculousness like a badge of honor. No, the greatest pleasure is watching four skilled comedians flesh out characters that each inhabit a fully formed, but completely separate, reality. Stillers straight-arrow, white-bread verve that makes a straight face and a tone of conviction eerily ridiculous; Vaughns boorish but basically good guy posturing, Ayoades chipper insouciance, and Hills version of James Dean as a slightly more than borderline sociopath. Of the four, hes the one who seems most likely to commit a felony without batting a lash of his hooded eyelids. Not that Vaughn, whose character is preoccupied with who is doing what with his pretty daughter, doesnt evoke a primal chill when he promises to rip her boyfriend free of his genitalia.
Impeccable timing, including the deliberate use of melodramatic camera tricks and stock action sequences conspire to create an arch mood as things get very, very weird, and not just from the odd green goo found at every crime scene, or the even more odd silver ball that does very, very bad things when the guys start playing with it.
Bad things may happen to cows and to kids on skateboards in THE WATCH as it takes a few lovely swipes at suburbia, very bad things, but that stop it from fulfilling its primary mission of being a rambunctious bundle of compulsively watchable silliness.
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