The Sitter

While Your Highness may have stretched the formula to its breaking point, David Gordon Green certainly has carved out his feature-film niche: pairing blunt, foul-mouthed slackers from the Apatovian School with outlandish action, then letting the comic sparks fly. His new film The Sitter follows that same Pineapple Express pattern by pitting Jonah Hill’s shameless layabout against drug-dealing gangsters, then combines it with Eastbound And Down by bringing in a gaggle of precocious kids for Hill to cuss at, which is a proven comic formula in and of itself. Here the newer, noticeably slimmer Jonah Hill 2.0—aided by a gaggle of adorably multiracial children—introduces the film, in which the older, jarringly larger Jonah Hill is tasked with babysitting that same gaggle over the course of one wild night, where his quest to sleep with Ari Graynor leads him to run afoul of drug dealer Sam Rockwell, Method Man, and other random denizens of the mean streets. Yes, it’s basically a retread of Adventures Of Babysitting, modernized and thoroughly hip-hopified here with the help of M.O.P.’s “Ante Up (Robbin Hoodz Theory).” And no, other than the sudden mental image of Jonah Hill doing Elisabeth Shue's bedroom dance routine, we don’t really have a problem with that.