“Adventures In Babysitting” doesn’t know what it wants to be and quite frankly I don’t think it cares. It’s a crossover of mismatched ideas that work as well as popcorn and toast.

In “Adventures In Babysitting”, Chris (Elisabeth Shue “The Karate Kid”, “Back To The Future”) gets her date cancelled and finds herself babysitting for two sex-obsessed teens and a girl that won’t shut up about the superhero Thor. Chris’ best friend gets herself in some serious trouble at a bus station so the gang journey into the city to find her but they end up facing gauntlet after gauntlet.

The Chris character isn’t bad and Elisabeth Shue tries to salvage the film the best she can but it’s impossible with this dud script. The two teenage kids are basically the same as teenagers in lots of films so there is nothing original here and while the little girl might be unique (she’s the first film character who is crazy about Thor I’ve ever seen) but she is just as boring as the two boys. The various people in this film are just scary; everybody has hook for a hand or thinks they live in a phone box or is a member of a gang. The characters just get stranger and stranger as the film goes on and they just hinder the film massively.

“Adventures In Babysitting” is very rarely funny and although at times it seems like a film intended for young kids the gang scene and the numerous appearances of Playboy magazines seem to contradict that sense you get during other parts of the movie. It’s 35% a film for kids, 40% a film for teens and the rest is for zombies. Parents won’t want their kids to see it because of the mature themes, smart teenagers are going to be watching something with substance to it, dumb teenagers are going to be watching their slasher films and adults are going to be having a life. “Adventures In Babysitting” is messy, messy, messy and somebody should have cleaned it up before letting everybody else see it.