The most interesting thing about The Sitter doesn't have anything to do with it's story, which was clearly ripped from two 1980s "one bad night" favorites, Adventures in Babysitting and Martin Scorsese's After Hours. It has to do with the man behind the camera, David Gordon Green. Once the darling of the independent scene, Green was responsible for thoughtful, poetic films like George Washington, All the Real Girls, and Snow Angels. His future full of promise, it was only a matter of time before a wider audience started to take notice of his talents. Well, the mainstream finally knows who Green is, but it's for making half-baked stoner comedies like Pineapple Express and this year's disastrous Your Highness. The Sitter doesn't reach that medieval flick's sinking depths(no Minotaur genitalia to be found), in fact it's head and shoulders better, but in the hands of an auteur like Green it should be infinitely better.
Jonah Hill, still in chunky flavor for probably the last time, plays useless slacker Noah. Well, not totally useless. He does have one particular gift that puts him in the favor of Marisa(the usually excellent Ari Graynor), the hot neighborhood girl who realizes she has Noah wrapped around her little finger. He's a good guy, but it's hinted that he's had some serious lapses in judgement in the recent past, the type that got him kicked out of college and back home living with mom. IN a relatively short period of time, Noah makes two more ill-advised decisions. The first is agreeing to babysit his neighbor's three rotten kids. The next is agreeing to score drugs for Marisa and deliver them to her, in the hopes that she'll finally have sex with him.
The journey will be hard enough, but with his three young charges in tow it's darn near impossible. There's Slater(Max Records), a pill popping nervous wreck; Blithe(Landry Bender), a celebrity obsessed brat with a foul mouth; and Rodrigo(Kevin Hernandez), an rough edged Hispanic adoptee with an explosives fetish and the tendency to run away. Really, he looks like the long lost son of Machete and acts like it, too. It's a situation primed for disaster, and things quickly go south. Noah runs afoul of a pair of loopy drug dealers(Sam Rockwell and J.B. Smoove), who pursue him throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. If that's not enough, Noah has the strangest of relationships with the entire African-American community it seems, who alternately loathe and love him at different stages. Oh, and let's not forget that he has to score drugs, have sex with his lady, not get killed, and have the kids home before bed time.
So yeah, Adventures in Babysitting with more filth(the word "sharting" is used at one point) and minus Elisabeth Shue's great legs is what you have here. The film works best when embracing it's raunchiness and the old school bounciness of Noah's mission. Jonah Hill, who has shown in films like Cyrus and Moneyball to have a considerable range when necessary, is still a shaky leading man at best. He's best at playing the sidekick, the comic foil. The script by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka doesn't give him a lot to work with, but Hill makes the best of it and is pretty solid playing an earnest guy who just wants to make everybody happy. Where the story really falls flat is when it tries to awkwardly jam in a few life lessons. The kids all have major problems, some involving neglect and sexual identity. These can't be solved with just a few words, so it never rings true when Noah does exactly that.
A crankin' 1990s hip hop soundtrack featuring Biz Markie and Slick Rick fits with the film's nostalgic vibe. Clocking at a brisk 81 minutes, The Sitter aims for maximum laughs in a compact frame. Most of these come from Rodrigo and the comic timeliness of his disappearances, or his wanton disregard for personal property. "I make bomb", he says just before a restaurant bathroom is blown to smithereens. Ari Graynor, Sam Rockwell, and the underrated J.B. Smoove aren't given much to do at all. Nobody is, and that includes David Gordon Green, who is far better than a mediocre and ultimately forgettable movie like this.
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