MOVIE REVIEWS: THE WATCH

The Watch was originally titled Neighborhood Watch until the incident in which a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, shot and killed Trayvon Martin last February. Ty Burr in the Boston Globe is one of several critics who comments that instead of merely retitling the Ben Stiller comedy, “better they should have canned the whole thing. Bad timing is one thing. … A bad movie is just insult upon injury.” Much of the action in the film takes place in a local Costco store, where aliens have taken up residence in the basement. Ordinarily a movie with so many product-placement references would be highly welcomed by the featured company. But Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer suggests that some Costco executives may not be all that pleased. “After all of The Watch‘s alien ejaculate jokes, its orgy scene, a near teenage date rape, and a running gag about the sex acts of Asian housewives, will the executive at Costco who signed off on this wall-to-wall piece of product placement still have his or her job?” he asks. Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News figures that The Watch should win the award for “super turkey” of the summer hands-down. He writes that it is “filled with the kind of desperate grab for chuckles usually found in grade-school gym classes, with the same level of sophistication.” But Stephen Holden in the New York Times is willing to cut it some slack, calling it “a whimsical, potty-mouthed buddy movie that lunges for laughs with bursts of profanity.” And Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle notes that “when the comedy runs out of gas, the movie introduces some fake sentiment and an action scene that mixes cartoon violence with jokes about genitalia..” He then adds: “But that description might make it seem more amusing than it is.”