The Watch Reviews
Top CriticA film packaged as pure product, aiming to snare the combined markets for loudmouth comics, sci-fi action and, er, Richard Ayoade - who, however seemingly misplaced, is the freshest thing here.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
It's a mash-up of blah buddy comedy and gross-out CGI monster splatter, with nary a laugh to be had.
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| Original Score: D
The Watch is a predictable and lazy comedy wrapped around a penis joke occasionally enlivened with some funny lines.
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| Original Score: 2/4
What should have been at least Ghostbusters lite ends up sliming audiences with sloppy seconds.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
"The Watch" takes the same ethos of male bonding, obsession with sex and sardonic violence that has proved so profitable in recent years on yet another summer spin.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Improvisation is definitely The Watch-word, with Vaughn and Hill in particular winging just about every line they speak - most of them filthy, few of them funny.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
For hang time with the guys, you could do worse than "The Watch."
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Really, wait for it on cable. At least then you'll be able to change the channel.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
The "action" scenes come across as brief, noisy periods of rest from the lame comedy, which counts for something, if not quite what the filmmakers intended.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Much of the action takes place after hours in the Costco managed by Stiller's character, but the laughs are not available in bulk.
Director Akiva Schaffer, excellent when directing and co-writing SNL Digital Shorts, has his hands full just trying to attach one ill-fitting scene to another, with little opportunity to establish a coherent style or, for that matter, a coherent shot list.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
We're talking about a dozen or so taken-by-surprise, spontaneous and genuine "Ha!" moments. And always one "ha," never two.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Directed by Akiva Schaffer from a screenplay by Jared Stern, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the movie clumsily juggles two loosely connected concepts.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Though many of the jokes land, some of them feel like a game of penis-related Mad Libs.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Imagine Attack the Block, only set in America. With a mostly middle-aged cast. And not funny. Or exciting.
A lowbrow, lame-brained mash-up of buddies-on-patrol comedy and sci-fi actioner.
Some of the phallic jokes work, others are really lame. Fortunately there are many other funny bits that have nothing to do with body parts that keep the laughs coming.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The Watch is a studio turd marinated in eau de skunk that stinks worse than week-old fish.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Though it's never transformational, it's mostly amusing. Which counts!
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| Original Score: B
It has bodily humor that tilts so far out of funny they land in "clinically embarrassing." And it makes Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Jonah Hill yell like hyenas to keep things lurching along.
It's just an excuse for jokes about male genitalia and its operational weaknesses.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The film is one long Costco joke -- but the punch line is never all that funny.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The Watch perks up when Ayoade's spacey line readings give it something unique and unexpected - otherwise, per Costco, audiences are buying their generic sci-fi comedy in bulk.
The bespectacled Ayoade is the odd man out in the group, and his offbeat, eerily cheery reading of every line lends the movie its single aspect of unpredictability.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
It's another one of those loud, penis-obsessed bro farces, lazily written (by actor Seth Rogen, among others) and haphazardly directed (by Akiva Schaffer, longtime "SNL" writer and part of the Lonely Island comedy team).
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Ayoade, the writer and director of last year's charming U.K. indie Submarine, brings a stranger-in-a-strange-land naiveté to the proceedings. He's The Watch's biggest surprise - not that there are many.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The bar is high for bad comedies, but "The Watch" promises to be this summer's worst.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
In the end, the jokes aren't funny enough, and there aren't enough of them to make up for the sound and fury and incoherence and, yeah, for the preponderance of damn shooting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
It's not likely that a big-screen alien invasion has ever felt less urgent.
If you want a descriptive term, "disappointment" should cover it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
You're unlikely to laugh much, and you may get an unexpected case of the non-art-imitates-bad-life creeps.
"The Watch" just feels like yet another generic Hollywood product; raunchier and dumber than it needs to be, never as funny as it wants to be.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
"The Watch" has lots of energy but not much inspiration.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Fortunately, everyone in the cast steps up to the plate and tags the bases convincingly.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
