The 2012 award for Worst Comedy of the Year may very well end up going to The Watch (previously titled Neighborhood Watch), the cinematic equivalent of a bunch of dudes siting around swearing and telling sex jokes while watching a sci-fi B movie. Directed by Akiva Schaffer (Hot Rod) and co-written by hit-and-miss duo Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (Superbad), this flashy monstrosity of a Hollywood comedy vehicle lumbers along with one flat joke after another, content with keeping the bar as close to the ground as possible.

Starring a cast which includes Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill and Richard “why the hell is he in this movie?” Ayoade (who most will know as Moss from The IT Crowd), this crass and lazy mash-up of sci-fi, comedy and action centres on Evan (Stiller), a do-gooder manager at the local Costco who, after the mysterious death of his security guard friend, takes it upon himself to start a neighbourhood watch group. Along with the only three people who are interested, Bob (Vaughn), Franklin (Hill) and Jamarcus (Ayoade), the “task force” sets out to find the killer, not knowing there’s some sort of alien invasion taking place.

The premise of the film is solid, providing much potential for some sci-fi related hilarity involving a group of people willing but not exactly able to handle the situation. The trouble is it’s just not funny, too often falling back on a soft bed of crude gags, tiresome improvisation, obvious references and a kind of all for one and one for all bromance that’s been done to death before in much better films. It also attempts, rather limply, at sentimentality not just when it comes to the friendship angle but a tacked on storyline involving Stiller’s character and his wife trying to have kids. There’s just too much going on here, too many tones and styles vying for attention all at once that it just never finds a level to stay on, meaning it never really works on any.

You’d think the admittedly promising cast would save it all but they even manage to mess that dynamic up. Stiller is once again the type of straight man he’s been doing whenever he wants to do comedy without going to the outlandish extremes of, say, Zoolander or Dodgeball (I really hope he chooses to do more dramatic roles in the vein of Greenberg). Vaughn is once again churning out another loud, crass performance he’s more often than not known for. Hill, while arguably the most effective of the four, is still hampered by a character that’s a mess of comedic intentions. And Ayoade, a talented comedy actor and gifted filmmaker (see The IT Crowd and Submarine, respectively), is entirely out of place as the sort of token British geek who doesn’t quite get the Americanisms. Obviously his character is intentionally mismatched with the rest of the team but it’s a cliched device that sort of embodies how and why the film plain doesn’t work.

Inevitably the film has to forget, at least for a while, about its low-brow comedy and deal with the alien invasion story is has set up. The obligatory showdown is as predictable as it is disappointing, managing to be both very over-the-top yet safe at the same time. By the end The Watch is such a mess that it lacks any comedic soul and is just about as far away from a shining example of how you can smash genres together as it’s possible to get.

The movie only reminds you just how well this sort of thing can be done with a good script put into the right hands. Just look at last year’s Attack the Block, a creative and supremely entertaining blend of genres which does everything right that The Watch does wrong. Seth MacFarlane already covered the crude comedy bases for this year with his swear-bear movie Ted (our review here), pulling it off in infinitely better fashion than this terminally unfunny mishmash.

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The Watch is out in UK cinemas on August 24th.