MOVIE REVIEW: This flick doesn't sit well

Kevin Hernandez, Max Records, Jonah Hill and Landry Bender in a scene from "The Sitter."

There’s a bittersweet finality behind “The Sitter.” It’s the last movie the classic version of Jonah Hill made before he was quietly destroyed and replaced with an off-putting Hill simulacrum who manages an amazing feat by simultaneously appearing doughy yet emaciated. Those golden days of the fat Jonah Hill are over and knowing this makes “The Sitter” nearly impossible to sit through.

Other elements making “The Sitter” nearly impossible to sit through include its laziness, its frequent mawkishness and the fact that it too often plays like a watered down, less-funny version of director David Gordon Green’s previous effort, “The Pineapple Express.”

In “The Sitter,” Hill yet again surrenders to typecasting as Noah Griffith, a pissy yet oddly likable ne’er-do-well who is forced into taking a babysitting gig. In spite of the fact that he clearly loathes children, Noah is put in charge of three, all of whom are defined by one single personality trait (Max Records is a repressed neurotic, Landry Bender is a shallow JonBenet Ramsay type and Kevin Hernandez is one sombrero and switchblade away from becoming one of the most negative Latino stereotypes ever to appear on screen.).

To complicate an already difficult situation, Noah is tasked by the horrible pile of terrible that is his quasi-girlfriend to score some coke from a lovably weird dealer (a great Sam Rockwell). So Noah loads the kids into a minivan and heads into New York City for an “After Hours” (wink, wink) “Adventure(s) in Babysitting” (winkidy, wink, wink. Get it? You get it. It’s funny).

It would be unfair to label “The Sitter” as a disappointment, but only because nobody was expecting much from the film in the first place. But even with appropriately lowered expectations, “The Sitter” still manages to disappoint which is a shame because throughout the film there are frequent glimpses into the weird, dark comedy “The Sitter” could have been.

There’s a scene early on between Hill and Bender in a kids’ clothing store that is fueled by a queasy, disarming energy the rest of the film lacks. There are even occasional snippets of great dialogue like when a cop describes Noah as, “tits in a ditch” (“Is that a good thing?” Noah replies). But instead of continuing down this strange path, Green blinks and turns “The Sitter” into a far more conventional comedy where everybody learns an important lesson at the end. It also doesn’t help that Green forces these ‘feel-good’ elements into the film in the most awkward way possible. You can’t have Hill call a 13-year-old kid “a tampon” one moment and then give that same kid a tender heart-to-heart about the importance of being yourself in the next.

The only consistently amusing element is Rockwell’s drug-dealer character. Not just because Rockwell infuses his role with equal parts menace and needy vulnerability but because the character is just so bizarre. How bizarre? At one point he shoots someone in the foot and tells an associate to “make his mom a mix CD as an apology.” Not weird enough? OK. Rockwell’s base of operations is a gym where shirtless musclemen in gasmasks smuggle blow into dinosaur eggs.

In a perfect world, this movie wouldn’t have been “The Sitter.” It would be “The Dealer,” and it would have been about one drug dealer’s valiant struggle to reclaim his stolen cocaine egg from some pissy fat kid in a blue windbreaker.

Rating: W 1/2