The Sitter: Unfunny Movie Excrement

If you take the 1987 classic Adventures in Babysitting, switch the gender of the sitter, stupidly transform the Darryl character into a psychotic, cherry-bomb obsessed Hispanic foster child, and lose all believable motivation behind any of the actions and situations in which they find themselves, you’ll have the soulless husk of a film that is The Sitter.

Being painfully unfunny is inarguably the cardinal sin of a comedy, which this Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka-scripted flick commits consistently throughout its mercifully short runtime. I only laughed twice: once at a line that I’d already heard in one of its few TV commercials and once in a lame during-the-credits gag. And they weren’t laughs so much as one-note chuckles, the desperate guttural bursts of a moviegoer starving for anything remotely comical from this non-comedy. Most everything else, from the awkward, overly sexual opening that felt about as fresh as a scene from the latest direct-to-video Van Wilder sequel to the nonsensical gibberish between Jonah Hill’s Noah Griffith and Soul Baby (Reggie A. Green), a doorman who speaks only in stereotypical jive-isms, couldn’t even do us the courtesy of providing even unintentional laughs.

But, The Sitter’s even more egregious offense is shooting from a pathetically amateur script in dire need of several more rewrites before being brought to the big screen – or any sized screen for that matter. There’s truly no excuse for blatant Screenwriting 101 mistakes in a film with film veterans behind and in front of the camera. Not only is there hardly a single likeable character in this entire film – even the three kids are relatively horrible humans, save for 13-year-old Slater (Max Records) who is dealing with extreme anxiety about his sexuality – literally nothing that happens makes an iota of sense. I’d call this a “just so happens” film, where in every scene, it just so happens that __________, where the blank is filled in with the most unlikely and plot-convenient event that constantly sucks you out of the cinematic world.

Whether it’s the random “Didn’t I go to high school with you and you puked in my grandma’s urn” woman that Griffith sees while buying new underwear for the 10-year-old girl who “sharted” (Along Came Polly called: it wants its joke back) in the minivan to that same random woman being at the very same restaurant they stop at for literally three minutes, which is long enough for her to steal their minivan – because that’s the normal retribution for someone having vomited in your relative’s ashes years before. I could seriously go on like this with every scene because that’s how insanely stupid these filmmakers must think we are that we’d go along with any of this.  

Speaking of the filmmakers: oh, David Gordon Green, what happened to you? You had so much potential! So much artistic cred that Terrence Malick himself took you under his wing and produced your third feature, Undertow. But unfortunately, that and your follow-up, Snow Angels — both of which were somber, low-budget flicks with solid performances and moody character-driven plots — didn’t quite catch fire with audiences. So, you went in a completely opposite direction: mainstream comedies. Pineapple Express was a huge hit. But then came Your Highness. And now, your true nadir, The Sitter.

The only good thing to come of The Sitter for Gordon Green – and for the rest of us who have to sit through his increasingly terrible films – is that I fail to see how he could do any worse than this excrement passing itself off as a legitimate movie. That is if any studio hires him to make another comedy, let alone movie, again.