'The Sitter' funny in parts but wildly uneven

The calibration is a bit off in 'The Sitter', David Gordon Green's comedy about a young slacker (Jonah Hill) tasked with minding three unruly children over the course of one insane evening.

Green aims to evoke 'Uncle Buck' and 'Adventures in Babysitting' – feel-good 80s family comedies from which the film freely borrows – while indulging in the same hard-R irreverence of his previous two films, 2008's 'Pineapple Express' and April's 'Your Highness'.

But the dual impulses prove impossible to reconcile, resulting in a comedy that, while often quite funny, is also wildly uneven. Rarely have I laughed out loud and rolled my eyes so much in the same film.

Hill plays Noah, an aimless college dropout who reluctantly agrees to babysit a neighbor's brood so that his harried single mother might enjoy a rare night on the town.

Anticipating an easy evening on the couch, he quickly has his hands full with the dysfunctional trio: 13-year-old Slater (Max Records) is a heavily-medicated basket-case; 10-year-old Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), an adopted El Salvadoran immigrant, likes to blow things up; and nine-year-old Blithe (Landry Bender), is in the midst of a "celebutante phase" emulating her sleazy reality-show idols.

Things begin to go awry for Noah when, in the first of several questionable decisions, he opts to take the kids along on a trip to buy drugs for his sort-of-girlfriend (Ari Graynor).

As you might have gathered, we've already ventured far, far away from John Hughes-land.

Yet Green doesn't seem to recognize as much. As Hill and company embark on a series of ever-escalating comic misadventures, there's a strange dissonance that pervades 'The Sitter', which tries to intermingle moments of outrageous vulgarity with scenes of high-grad Hallmark sap.

The latter eventually take on a certain comic absurdity of their own: my favorite was a third-act dialogue exchange, barely two minutes in length, in which Noah, newly enlightened by the night's encounters with a drug dealer (an unhinged, scene-stealing Sam Rockwell), car thieves, kickboxers, steroid-pumped goons, and the like, manages to wean one of his charges off his psychiatric meds and cure him of his sexual-orientation anxiety in one fell swoop.

Is Green, a former indie darling, bowing to studio dictates with such a patently artificial crock, or slyly subverting them? Either way, it's a futile endeavor.

Star Rating: 3/5