'The Watch' Review - Comedy At Its Usual

In The Watch, Evan (Ben Stiller) is the consummate community member.  He's on every board, started many community programs, and is the Costco manager.  Things go horribly awry when his night watchman is killed by... something.

Evan decides to start a community watch group and holds a meeting at his place...  but instead of the turn out he hoped for, he gets Bob (Vince Vaughn), Franklin (Jonah Hill) and Jamarcus (Richard Ayoade) showing up.

It's a disappointing turnout, but there's a lot of energy in this group.  That is, once they moved the meeting to Bob's place, where all the beer is.  Yes, Bob is the bad influence of the group.

And the chase is on for the Costco murderer.

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The Watch is directed by Akiva Schaffer (MacGruber, Saturday Night Live TV series) and one of the writers is Seth Rogen.  Sort of explains some of the raunchy language that comes out of the screen at times.

If you like these actors, it's pretty much what you would expect from them, except they're all together in the same movie.

I'm not a huge comedy movie watcher, and this movie is an atypical comedic effort at preventing an alien invasion.  The first act was cute.  The second act slowed down a bit but the third act has a nice twist or two and gets a bit funnier.

The closing action made it interesting.  And the aliens were actually well done.

I'm glad I didn't drop movie theater money on it.  I would have been OK dropping rental funds on it, and I think if it comes up on your cable pay channel or TV, it should be great fun.

On the static popcorn movie scale, I'd give The Watch a popcorn 6.

-Bruce
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