The background
When the Costco night guard is murdered and the cops don’t seem too on top of it, Costco manager Evan (Ben Stiller) decides to start a neighbourhood watch. The guys who turn up include full-time dad and part-time party guy Bob (Vince Vaughn), failed cop Franklin (Jonah Hill) and divorcé Jamarcus (Richard Ayoade). Initially they all seem more interested in having fun than fighting crime, but a bigger threat awaits the foursome than they could possibly imagine, forcing them eventually to put down their drinks and set off to save the neighbourhood, and… the world.
The most phallicly obsessed film of all-time?
It was widely conceded among critics that this movie did tend to rely a little too heavily on its penis jokes. “Never in the history of mankind has a movie been more phallicly fixated than The Watch,” observed Betsy Sharkey at the The Los Angeles Times, who said some of the penis gags “work,” while others are just “really lame.” Leonard Maltin from Indiewire concurred: “It isn’t just crass; it wallows in its crassness. In the ever-escalating war against decorum onscreen, The Watch uses the slang word for semen over and over again. Too bad there isn’t an Olympic competition for crudity.”
It sure has its moments
It’s not all crudity and stupidity though, said the critics, many of whom found plenty to laugh at. “The Watch has a lot going for it – a solid premise, an all-star comedy cast, as well as script-work contributions from funny man favorites Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg,” praised Ben Kendrick from Screenrant. Sharkey, who was sceptical of the movie’s comedy value as a whole, found “many of the individual sketches are very funny, in that dumb-dudes-doing-dumb-things kind of way.” Sherri Linden from The Hollywood Reporter insisted that there are “at least as many misses as hits.”
A Marmite movie – you’ll either love it or hate it
Matlin from Indiewire compared the movie to a bag of pork rinds: some love it, some can’t stand it. “But as we all know,” he said, “comedy is a personal matter.” He concluded that If you enjoy crude, crass, sexually centred jokes “you’ll probably have a better time than I did.”