The Sitter is a Jonah Hill film. Now Jonah Hill is someone that at first I found annoying, unfunny and quite frankly got in the way of some other better, funnier actors. Then something strange happened, I started to warm to him, I started to find his charm amongst the cock jokes, and yes, I even found him funny. It was this reason why I approached The Sitter with caution. It's from director David Gordon Green, who made the very patchy Pineapple Express, and the utterly awfully shit Your Highness, a film that even the presence of Zooey Deschanel couldn't save from my hatred. So I went to see it, but I expected very little.
On the plus side, it's the best film I've seen yet from David Gordon Green, it worked the story together much better than Pineapple Express, and well... wasn't Your Highness in any respect, which was nice. However, it didn't stray too far from his comfort zone, with the stories of Drug Dealers and unlikely heroes rearing its head from the Pineapple Express lot. In essence this film is about a bad babysitter, played by Jonah Hill, who is left in charge of 3 young kids, all of whom exemplify a stereotype often associated with children. The nervous fragile kid, the brat obsessed by makeup and being grown up NOW, and the little troublemaker, not quite fitting in with his adopted family, and causing trouble to get attention. At the promise of Sex Jonah Hill's babysitter takes these three children on a very dangerous trip to a drug den, robbing a jewelers, and through gun infused car chases, all for a little bit of nookie. It's the very definition of unbelievable.
The film is therefore saved from utter depravity by a very warm performance from Jonah Hill, whose character is shown to love his mum above all else, after all, the only reason he took the Babysitting job in the first place was to help his mum go on a date and find happiness. He also ends up teaching the kids a valuable lesson, whether it's that it's okay to be who you are, and that if other people can't accept that then that is something that they need to worry about, not you. Or whether it's that you need to be a kid for as long as you can, growing up sucks and to aspire to that is just silly, and finally that people do care about you, you just need to stop driving them away or they might not for much longer. They aren't the most original of messages, but they do the trick, and the warmth of Hill's performance makes for a more enjoyable experience.
Some of the jokes do fall flat in this film, it's far from perfect, but there are also many reasons to watch it. It's not a film you buy, it's not even a film you make an extra effort to watch, it's a film you catch on TV and you find yourself enjoying quite a lot, but with little desire to go back and revisit. It's solid enough to make me say I enjoyed it, but flawed enough to warrant some scorn. It's average, and Jonah Hill is the reason it's not terrible, that being said, the kids do a good job with what they are given, and I hope to see more of them in the future.
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