The latest local news, weather and high school sports in and around Columbia and Jefferson City

“The Watch” has been through numerous changes, rewrites, setbacks and problems throughout its history. In fact, the movies development began four years ago in 2008. It was supposed to be a “Ghostbuster” thingy. It was at one point supposed to star and be directed by Will Ferrell. Then it went without a Director for a long while. Finally Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg came in to rewrite and SNL’s Akiva Schaffer came in to direct. Then the Trayvon Martin shooting happened, and the movie about a group of Neighorhood Watch men faced another challenge. The marketing scheme had to be dramatically changed.

Based on all of these hurdles, “The Watch” is not a bad movie. It is gifted with some pretty good humor from the talents of Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Richard Ayoade and Jonah Hill. Ultimately though, the movie could have been so much better. The premise is outstanding. When Ben Stiller’s character, Evan Trautwig, is greeted with a gruesome murder scene when he comes to his job at Cosco one morning, he decides to start a neighborhood watch team in order to save his beautiful, friendly and peaceful community. The band-of-misfits are clueless what they will eventually be up against.

Despite three years of development though, the numerous collaborators either left out a lot of creative stuff, had to edit out a lot of creative stuff or overlooked the fact that their movie was in desperate need of something more unique. Too much of the movie relied upon the bitter-batter of its stars, which for the most part is funny, but gets old eventually. Enough time wasn’t spent making “The Watch” something other than mediocre or run-of-the-mill.

We will probably not know what all happened to “The Watch” in its long process or what it could have been, but its ultimate outcome is pretty disappointing. It’s too bad though because the humor in the movie is very funny. The actors worked well together, but given the premise of the movie, it should have been so much more than it was. All it ends up being, is a missed opportunity.