GRADE: D

Wow, what a disaster The Sitter was. The first twenty minutes had moments of hilarity, but then the bottom dropped out and not even the comedic skills of Jonah Hill could save it. Not even the often great Sam Rockwell, playing the threatening drug dealing bad guy, could save The Sitter. How many times is this tired comedic formula going to be tried on audiences? — i.e. Guy thrown into a night featuring a ridiculous serious of events all rolling out, one after another, each building on your stomach’s ability to handle the excess of crap. Of course the movie is supposed to be off the wall, but one can only ingest so much.

The roller coaster starts when Noah (Jonah Hill) is coerced into acting as a delivery boy to bring his drunk girlfriend cocaine. The problem is that he’s babysitting — of course, he decides to bring the children into bars, to a drunken party, a coke dealers’ dangerous neighborhood, on a car chase, and much more on his quest to acquire the white powder. I wasn’t concerned with all this being completely immoral, because it’s a movie, but this type of moronic situational humor — the slapstick girl-sprays-perfume-in-guys-mouth-type humor — lost any entertainment value about halfway through. It got old, fast.

As the The Sitter progressed, it replaced the laughs for attempts at creating deeper characters. But that only really came from the eldest boy Slater who revealed some deep seeded insecurities and the youngest girl, Blithe, who wanted to grow up too fast. Noah was a character who made numerous terrible decisions and was unlikable throughout — and once the laughs began to fade, and the ridiculousness of the movie began to overwhelm, it was hard to find a reason to keep watching.

Overall, the talents of Jonah Hill and Sam Rockwell are wasted in this run-of-the-mill, unfunny situational comedy. Jokes in the first act of The Sitter stood strong — but nothing else followed suit. For an adult comedy, the progression of events were obviously extremely raunchy, but the plot was overdone and childish. In my estimation it’s just an R-rated Disney Channel movie — if there were such a thing.

What Should You Do? I wouldn’t waste a minute on The Sitter unless Jonah Hill is your favorite funny leading man.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @matthewdeery