Edgy Observe and Report Doesn’t Arrest
Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) is head of mall security and he takes his job extremely seriously. When a repugnant flasher has the temerity to showcase his meager wares in front of makeup counter saleswoman Brandi (Anna Faris), the unrequited love of his life, he decides to take matters into his own hands. With the aid of his eclectic staff and bereted by a police detective (Ray Liotta) tired of his narcissistic behavior, Ronnie is certain of his righteousness, positive the world is ready to applaud his unique brand of violently delivered heroism.
Anna Faris and Seth Rogen in Warner Bros.' Observe and Report
I’m going to say this only once, the only thing Observe and Report has in common with Paul Blart: Mall Cop is that both films happen to involve mall security guards, otherwise they couldn’t be more different. Where the latter is a genial, undeniably blasé piece of pap family entertainment, writer/director Jody Hill’s (The Foot Fist Way) latest effort is about as foul and as nasty as anything I can imagine. It is edgy and unrepentant in its nascent grotesqueness, not caring one single bit if you like any of the characters inhabiting his world one single bit.
This is worth applauding on some level, and I like the fact that Rogen is so brazenly up to the challenge to sink to whatever depths Hill decides to send him to. Unfortunately, the truth of the matte is that this movie, even with its willingness to push the envelope and present some seriously uncomfortable (and sometimes uncomfortably funny) situations, just isn’t very good, the filmmaker so obsessed with his own un-politically incorrect behavior he forgets to make the movie lived-in or believable.
For me this is a major problem. A few early reviews compared this film to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver or After Hours and while I get the correlation, the difference is that in those pictures the director sets up a New York cityscape you could easily become lost in. No matter how far off the deep end Travis Bickle fell or whatever kookiness it was that Paul Hackett stumbled over into there was still a tactile electricity to the milieus these two helped fill, making their ultimate destinations all the more shocking and/or hilarious.
Hill never achieves this. Everything feels plastic and false, the tone shifting so frequently that the farce, satire and simplistic Sandler-style dumb comedy don’t ever coalesce into something intriguing and alive. This is a movie where the filmmaker is so proud of his archaic demeanor he forgets to make it count for anything meaningful, the end result nothing more than a smug mish-mash completely afraid (or just unwilling) to take its central storyline all the way through to its tragically bleak finale.
Not that there isn’t plenty to love (or at least admire) about Observe and Report. As alluded to above, Rogen is simply fantastic in this, digging right to the center of bi-polar Ronnie’s core inhabiting him so completely the popular Knocked Up dufus disappears completely. I also really liked Celia Weston as the security guard’s hard-drinking, yet well meaning, mother and relative newcomer Collette Wolfe as mall food court employee he attempts to become a much-needed friend. Both women sparkle for entirely different reasons, each of them leaving an imprint that lasted long after I left the theater.
For once, the same can not be said of the usually reliable Faris. She’s going through the motions here, the actress not doing anything with her character she hasn’t been asked to do seemingly a zillion times before. She looks haggard and bored, and other than one admittedly luminous bit involving a bevy of tequila shots she’s just not all that interesting.
Ultimately, her performance is neither here nor there as far as my ultimate feelings about the movie are concerned. My issues are with Hill’s jumbled script along with his arch directorial style. I never bought into Observe and Report, never believed any of the outlandish occurrence taking place were coming true. As such the film lost its power over me, and no matter how shocking things got or how ghastly the things Ronnie decided to do I eventually lost interest, respecting the intent far more than the actual finished project.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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