“The Watch” ranks among career lows not only for its stars (including Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Jonah Hill), writers (among them Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg) and director (Akiva Schaffer, who gave us the underrated Andy Samberg vehicle “Hot Rod”) but also for Costco, which plays a key role in the movie.
You were much funnier in “Idiocracy,” Costco.
A laugh-deprived movie that’s striking at a singularly bad time in the zeitgeist — after the Trayvon Martin shooting, the film’s title stopped being “Neighborhood Watch” — “The Watch” feels half-hearted from all sides. One imagines some studio suit deciding that somewhere along the line, some rewrites or some on-set improv or some post-production could magically render this material amusing, but that alchemy never happened.