tek's rating:

Adventures in Babysitting, on Disney Channel
Disney Channel Wiki; Disney Movies; Disney Wiki; IMDb; TV Tango; TV Tropes; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Disney+; Google Play; iTunes; YouTube

This aired in 2016, but I didn't see it until 2022. It's a reimagining of the 1987 movie of the same name, but while the two movies have a lot in common, there are also a lot of differences. It wasn't nearly as good as the original movie, and the whole thing is pretty redonkulous. So many things that happen simply couldn't have happened if the movie bore any resemblance to reality. And there's so much that the kids (and the babysitters) do wrong. Maybe it's the adult in me, which rarely rears its head, but I feel like they should have just called their parents at so many points, instead of insisting on hiding the truth from them. (Well, Emily called her parents at one point, but that didn't accomplish anything.) But whatever, it's still not a terrible movie. I mean, it had its good points, I guess.

There's a very straight-laced, uptight teenager named Jenny Parker (Sabrina Carpenter, whom I knew from Girl Meets World), who is applying for an internship with a famous photographer. There's another teenager, Lola Perez (Sofia Carson, whom I knew from Descendants), who is the total opposite of Jenny: very carefree and irresponsible. (At one point it's mentioned that Lola is 19. I'm not sure how old Jenny is, but surely at least a year or two younger than that.) Lola applying for the same internship as Jenny, and as so often happens in movies like this, they end up accidentally switching phones. A woman named Mrs. Anderson calls Jenny, who often babysits for her kids, to ask for a recommendation of a sitter. Jenny couldn't do it because she's already babysitting for the Coopers that night. (One of the mothers is a doctor, I can't remember if it's Cooper or Anderson, and she's winning an award of some kind, and both sets of parents attend the award party.) When Lola answers Jenny's phone, she pretends to be Jenny recommending Lola for the job, because she'd just gotten a parking ticket (from a rookie cop named James, on whom Lola develops a crush, and who shows up several times throughout the movie). The Anderson kids are a girl named Emily who is probably about 12, and a younger girl named Katy (who is obsessed with jewelry and fancy clothes). The Cooper kids are Trey, who is probably in his early teens, and his younger siblings, a boy named Bobby (who is obsessed with baking) and and a girl named AJ (who is obsessed with roller derby). Emily does things like color her hair green and get a henna tattoo, in an attempt to impress Trey (on whom she has a crush). Meanwhile, Trey sneaks out of the house to buy a ticket to a concert. For reasons I won't get into, both babysitters and four of the kids end up together, and when they realize Trey is gone, they take the car of one set of parents to the city to look for him. This begins a wild night of adventures.

Well, their first stop is the pawn shop where Trey bought the tickets, but he was gone by the time they get there. Lola takes a picture of the pawn shop owner, Tiny, holding a rare type of ferret, not knowing that the ferret is stolen and Tiny is trying to sell it on the black market. He wants to get the camera to erase the picture, so he and the ticket scalper who works there end up chasing the kids throughout the movie. Beyond that, I don't want to spoil any of the plot... except to say that, just as the kids in the first movie were forced to sing the blues, at one point the kids in this movie are forced to improvise a rap, which ended up being slightly less cringe than I expected it to. Oh, and there's a boy named Zac, who at one point called Jenny to ask her out, but that was when Lola had her phone, and she said she wasn't interested. But by the end of the movie that mix-up gets resolved. And I guess that's all I want to say about the plot. The movie has a happy ending, of course, though I still think a lot of problems could have been avoided if either babysitter had acted more responsibly.


DCOM index