The Watch

Directed by Akiva Schaffer

(R)

*

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.”