It’s nice to know that this time of year, not every actor and filmmaker is succumbing to the pressure to make films that are Oscar-baiting dramas, or tear-jerking love tales, or epic biopics, or even any good! Yes, Jonah Hill comes through for us yet again, lowering the bar so that Rob Schneider doesn’t have to.
Made after Hill’s stellar turn in Moneyball, it seems the dizzying heights of a career best left the actor with a desire to return to the deep ravines of sub-par/standard/human ”comedy”. An unfathomably horrible semi-remake of 1987’s Adventures In Babysitting, Hill plays Noah, a charmless, pervy slacker who’s roped into babysitting his neighbour’s kids: the sexually confused neurotic Slater (Where The Wild Things Are’s Max Records), eight-year-old Kardashian-wannabe Blythe, and their adopted pyromaniac brother Rodrigo. One invitation for sex, one stop-off at a drug dealer’s and one oh-so-hilarious misunderstanding later and our young squire finds himself and his three young wards on the bad side of local drug dealer Sam Rockwell. (I don’t know why either, I’m guessing he had a large tax bill.)
As Hill carts the kids around trying to find the ten grand needed to assuage Rockwell’s temper, Green trots out every offensive stereotype he can possibly think of. From sassy black gang-members to roller-blading, belly-baring gay men, there’s not one redeeming character in the entire film – including Noah himself. Hill is phoning in his default asshole mode here, and without the Apatow skill to layer in some heart with the homophobic punchlines, Green offers him no escape route towards redemption. And worse – Green doesn’t even believe that Noah needs it. When a beautiful classmate spots him stealing money from a child’s bar mitzvah, he’s not chastised, but inexplicably rewarded with a date.
Don’t pander to Green in the same way – don’t reward him with your money.