A night on the town: "The Sitter"

The Sitter looks, to all intents and purposes, like the New American Comedy's attempt to scuzz up and thus reclaim the PG-rated unsuitable-guardian template, recognising that even such VHS timewasters as Adventures in Babysitting or Kindergarten Cop were more entertaining (and often more interesting) than the kind of limp half-term product Vin Diesel, The Rock and Jackie Chan have laboured joylessly through in recent years. A pre-diet Jonah Hill is the doughy putz who unwisely elects to take his rich neighbours' three varyingly bratty offspring - a Paris Hilton wannabe, an anxiety-ridden nerveball, and an adopted Latino sociopath-in-training - on a run to score some coke for him and his girlfriend; inevitably, he spends the remainder of the evening having to deal with the consequences.

It's been slapped together - again, we're given cause to mourn the loss of the care director David Gordon Green and cinematographer Tim Orr took on their first collaborations - yet The Sitter still has a way of pushing even its crassest material one or two beats past the obvious. In the city, Hill encounters a lisping, rollerskating drugslinger who would appear the most antiquated of stereotypes, but it transpires he's merely the gatekeeper for an underground muscle gym, the most expensive part of the whole production, where men in posing pouches sledgehammer down brick walls to the accompaniment of "The Pina Colada Song". And for all the other things it's missing, it does have a heart: a deftly acted scene - not so very far away from the director's work with young performers in George Washington - in which Hill coaxes the eldest of his charges (Max Records, the kid from Where the Wild Things Are) into admitting his suppressed feelings.

The film makes a clumsily likable show of dismantling stock comedy homophobia and racism (from its soundtrack to its supporting cast, The Sitter is conspicuously less white than its predecessors), although its latent misogyny may be a sticking point: this time it's Ari Graynor who lands the token bitch role these comedies keep throwing up, a recipient of unreciprocated oral sex, dumped in favour of a nice black girl (newcomer Kylie Bunbury, all kinds of wonderful), whom the end credits assert is far less squeamish about such things. In the end, if it's the usual business of lessons being learnt and responsibility assumed - precisely nothing to send you racing to the Odeon, when you could stick it on your lovefilm list and wait four months for it to be sent to you - The Sitter is nevertheless further proof of the New American Comedy's peculiar alchemy: even screenfiller like this has the lines, music cues, and unexpected bits of business to raise it well above the low bar set by The Pacifier, The Tooth Fairy or The Spy Next Door.

The Sitter is in cinemas nationwide.