When did it become acceptable to show full frontal male nudity in Hollywood comedies? When did that become okay? For some reason, the male apparatus has made its proud appearance in Sideways, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Bruno and now Jody Hill’s high-grossing comedy about an overzealous mall cop, Observe and Report, starring the all-too-employed Seth Rogen. When I say “high-grossing,” I refer not to its box office returns, but its stomach-turning qualities. Here, the male equipment is shown swinging in the breeze in slow motion, which seems to be a sub-specialty of raunch comedy these days. We can blame Alexander Payne for first slow-moing the male hoo-ha in Sideways. But Hill takes things to the next level with Observe and Report, which some audiences are cheering, though the film may make most people wary of visiting malls.
Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen) is a mall security chief with delusions of grandeur, a condition he fights with daily doses of Clonazepam, an anti-bipolar drug, as well as the air of authority he displays while stopping shoplifters and petty criminals prowling the local mall. “If only we could carry guns,” his equally deranged underlings whine. (Hey, come to Manila, guys; they’ll let you tote shotguns inside McDonald’s!) “Well, we’ve got Tasers and mace,” Ronnie consoles them. “That’s not bad.”
But Ronnie’s dedication fails to nab a middle-aged flasher who preys on unsuspecting women in the parking lot. Among the victims is Brandi (Anna Faris, typically slutty, but funny), Ronnie’s dream girl who instead falls for investigating Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta). Ronnie decides to join the police force to prove he’s got the right stuff, but fails the psychological test when it becomes clear that he’s more interested in fighting the demons in his head with a very large shotgun.
Quentin Tarantino has called this movie, Hill’s first writing/directing effort, the “second best movie of the year.” (I’m pretty sure his favorite was The Hangover; no accounting for taste.) I think I understand why, though: it has an anarchic quality, uses the “F” word liberally, and references tons of other movies. The opening scenes at a gun firing range recall Taxi Driver, as does Ronnie’s obsessive “mission” to protect Brandi from the renegade flasher. (He even has Ronnie recite his mission in a voiceover like De Niro’s Travis Bickle, stopping to correct his mistakes on camera.)
The film that Observe and Report most resembles in gonzo spirit is Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg’s 2007 comedy Hot Fuzz, the hyperkinetic “fish out of water” cop movie that references about 100 other cop movies during its whiplash-edited length. Having made a name for themselves with the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead, the writing/directing duo ratcheted things up to 11 for their overzealous cop caper. You can see shades of this in Hill’s crazed, hyper comic timing, though needless to say, Observe and Report is about one-tenth as witty.
Film geeks will also notice that the plot is virtually lifted straight from the Kevin James comedy Paul Blart: Mall Cop. But Rogen claims they had that filmmaker’s blessings to serve up a “dark version of Mall Cop.”
Elsewhere, Hill takes us back to Abel Ferrera’s Bad Lieutenant, as Ronnie decides to join forces with Dennis (Michael Peña, funny as hell), a soft-spoken, lower-echelon mall cop who, it turns out, likes to “drink from the volcano” — and consume lots of illegal narcotics as well. They set out (literally) busting young skateboarders who ignore the “Skateboarding Prohibited” signs in the parking lot, snapping pictures of women undressing in the female dressing booths, and generally crossing over to the “other side” of mall security. Soon, though, Ronnie heads back to what he feels is his true destiny: protecting the mall like Bruce Wayne’s alter ego in The Dark Knight.
The many film references scattered like buckshot throughout Observe and Report are never cheap or obvious, as you’d find in Scary Movie type parodies, yet they’re unevenly woven into the story (such as it is), which makes this schizophrenic comedy even more unsettling. Ronnie, after all, does have mental problems. Not only that, we are introduced to his alcoholic mother (Celia Weston) who, by the end of the movie, announces she’s “making changes” in her life. “You’re quitting drinking?” Ronnie asks in amazement. “I’m switching to beer! I can pound those all day and still keep my s**t together!”
Other un-P.C. topics cheerfully touched on in Observe and Report are date rape (Ronnie happily supplies Brandi with Clonazapem before bedding her), disabled employee etiquette and racial profiling. But it’s all, um, in service of plot and laughs.
Politically correct Observe and Report is not. Nor does it go soft the way recent Farrelly Brothers (or Judd Apatow) outings might. Ronnie never does get the character makeover you swore was coming from scene one. His delusions remain his own, as ingrained as his crew-cut and his belief in the power of brute force against all evildoers. Sounds scarily familiar, actually: almost like a certain recent US president and vice president.
The gun fetishism in Observe and Report, though, is way alarming. In an age when Americans happily strap on handguns to attend presidential town hall debates on health care, it seems deliberately provocative to champion guns as the solution to problems. There’s a certain disturbing glee in the way Ronnie uses a Taser on ethnic types. (A similar situation is also milked for laughs in the recent comedy The Hangover.) Ronnie’s obsession with having a gun in hand makes Travis Bickle seem comparatively sane. Though it’s clear that Hill is trying to force the audience to deal with the discomfort of watching a “hero” like Ronnie, the uneven tone of Observe and Report (Do we laugh? Or gasp?) simply leaves the message muddled. Tellingly, the one film reference Hill cheerfully admits to is Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. In that dark comedy, we start out laughing with Robert De Niro’s would-be comedian, Rupert Pupkin, as he finagles his way onto a famous TV talk show by kidnapping the host. But it’s quickly made clear that beneath Pupkin’s insanely cheerful demeanor is true-blue insanity. Then it’s not so funny anymore. Hill just barely manages to return from the brink of having us switch sides on our hero, and maybe coming to realize that his kind of craziness really has no place defending us.