The Watch
Neighborhood do-gooders stumble on an alien invasion.
Directed by Akiva Schaffer
(R)
*
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
The premise behind this ensemble comedy has potential, but the result is “mediocre, slightly sloppy, and a mild waste of a great cast,” said Mike Russell in the Portland Oregonian. Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, and Richard Ayoade star as suburbanites who start a neighborhood watch group to solve a murder but wind up uncovering an alien invasion. Various other subplots have been tacked on, but they only highlight “how half-baked the story and characters are.” The witless script is “filled with the kind of desperate grab for chuckles usually found in grade-school gym classes,” said Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. Indeed, the overload of bodily humor “tilts so far out of funny” that it registers as “clinically embarrassing.” The Watch benefits slightly “from the practiced comic timing of the actors,” and its drooling, sharp-toothed aliens are at least reasonably up to date, said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. Still, the film is “so determined to be crude, vulgar, and offensive that after a while I grew weary.” It’s “not that I was offended”; I simply “wasn’t amused.”
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Trump uses tariffs to upend Brazil's domestic politics
IN THE SPOTLIGHT By slapping a 50% tariff on Brazil for its criminal investigation into Bolsonaro, the Trump administration is brazenly putting its fingers on the scales of a key foreign election
-
3 questions to ask when deciding whether to repair or replace your broken appliance
the explainer There may be merit to fixing what you already have, but sometimes buying new is even more cost-effective
-
'Trump's authoritarian manipulation of language'
Instant Opinion Vienna has become a 'convenient target for populists' | Opinion, comment and editorials of the day