Entertainment

Hill of a good time with pinch sitter

‘I’m not Mary Poppins,” protests Jonah Hill’s Noah. No, you’re Elisabeth Shue, and “The Sitter” is an unacknowledged remake of “Adventures in Babysitting” with the raunch dial turned up to max. It’s smart, funny, agreeably perverse and simultaneously abrupt and exhausting.

Noah gets things rolling with an oh-no-they-didn’t dirty joke involving a companion, Marisa (Ari Graynor), who may or may not be his girlfriend.

If you don’t like the opening, you’re probably not going to go for the rest, because when Noah’s mom forces him to take a baby-sitting gig, his three charges turn out to be a Salvadoran kid, Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), who likes to urinate on floors and blow up toilets; a precocious little girl, Blithe (Landry Bender), who is eager to get started on being a slut; and a neurotic teen boy, Slater (Max Records of “Where the Wild Things Are”), who wears a fanny pack full of pills.

When Marisa calls offering an opportunity to assuage his sexual frustrations, all Noah has to do to score is score: She needs him to drop by the local insane drug dealer (Sam Rockwell) and pick up some cocaine. Soon Noah and the minivan he has been forbidden to drive are squealing through Queens and Brooklyn.

It’s just like “The Odyssey,” if Homer had thought of gay bodybuilders who work out to the “Pina Colada” song, dinosaur eggs full of blow, Sammy Davis Jr. impersonators, a heist at a bat mitzvah and punishing a dude by shooting him in the roller skates.

Blithe, age 9, opines that Noah is “a hot name” because the Bible is “a hot book,” applies a level of makeup suggestive of an Edwardian prostitute and requests a Red Bull and vodka. Rodrigo runs around in cowboy boots and pajamas tossing cherry bombs. Slater has a relatively simple issue: he’s gay — “queer as a football bat” — but as Noah points out, this means merely that someday “You’ll get an excellent job in the entertainment industry, you’ll be super-organized and you’ll smell good.”

That scene is actually touching and cheery, and while it doesn’t quite fit in with the madness (pistols, car chases and blowing up a jewelry store also figure), it’s one of the best in a movie that would have done well to catch its breath once in a while.

As it is, it calls to mind rock guitarist Andy Summers’ remark that when the Police first played, they ripped through every song they knew with such fervid abandon that when they were done, only 12 minutes had gone by. “The Sitter” begins to wind up at the one-hour mark and deposits you back on the street 15 minutes later (when credits begin to roll).

The second half isn’t as strong as the first. Rockwell, for instance, is initially hilarious as a lonely big-time cokehead and criminal whose feelings are hurt easily and Facebook-friends Noah immediately after they meet (but before the drug dealer realizes the kid Rodrigo has stolen enough cocaine to stuff a pillow). After a while he becomes more goofy than funny.

Judd Apatow isn’t credited in this movie (as he was in others Hill appeared in), and the quadrilateral balance between intelligent/ridiculous and warm/ribald hasn’t quite been mastered by director David Gordon Green (who also did “Pineapple Express,” a movie that was 20 minutes too flabby just as this one is 20 minutes too tight). Still, he and the film leave us with wisdom for the ages: “Make love to the night, motherf – – – er.”