You know you’ve just watched a really nasty piece of filmmaking when the one character to which you can most relate is a psychotic cop played by Ray Liotta. Such is the case with director Jody Hill’s Observe And Report.
Amidst the human swill that populates this worthless comedy, Liotta, in a support role as the police officer called to a suburban mall to nail a flasher, offers the only vaguely human presence. Seth Rogen, surely nearing his end as the \'go-to\' comedy star of the moment (a Vanity Fair cover shoot?? Come on...) plays Ronnie Barnhardt, a socially-inept, bi-polar sufferer who sees his day job as a mall cop as a stepping stone to a career as a fully-fledged police officer. When not swearing at shoppers or racially-profiling his co-workers, Ronnie lusts after Brandi (Anna Faris, trotting out her patented conniving-but-lovable-slut routine). Things go horribly wrong for Ronnie and the audience when, after a spectacularly-embarrassing job interview with the police, and a dinner with Brandi that leads to a sickening scene involving vomit and date-rape, he loses his job at the mall.
Subplots abound but none offer insight, subtext or comedy. Support characters are one dimensional and truly offensive. Michael Pena is the lisping, thieving Mexican co-worker; real-life twins John and Matt Yuen are bumbling Asian security guards; Aziz Ansari is a foul-mouthed Middle Eastern mall tenant coined Saddam... mmm, get the picture? Add the mincing, red-headed gay guy (Alston Brown) and the drunken suburban mom (Celia Watson), and you can form your own opinion as to the level of contempt the filmmakers had for their characters and the roles they would play.
The final scenes, partly involving a full-frontal mall streak and some shocking violence, take the movie into that rarified air of bad-taste, high-concept comedy that, if the rest of the film had been as cleverly brazen, may have resulted in a classic of the genre, such as Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003). But writer/director Hill doesn’t have the chops to explore the deeper psychology that drives a nutcase like Ronnie – he is happy to present the big, fat loser as just a big, fat loser, expecting us to care about his plight. Much like the best action movies, where the cliffhanger scenes only work if you care about the characters in peril, comedies need a hook upon which to hang our emotions so that, despite the incessant swearing, sexist posturing, homophobic ranting and penis exposing, there some kind of cushion for us, the audience, even if it seems far away at times.
There is internet buzz that Observe And Report has 'cult-classic’ written all over it, but I’m doubtful. There is really only a handful of films with a true cult following from recent years (Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, 2001, The Coen Brother’s The Big Lebowski, 1998, or the afore-mentioned Bad Santa, for example) and they all have a uniqueness of vision and freshness in their storytelling that makes revisiting them a consistently rewarding experience. None of those qualities exist within Observe And Report – it’s a dirty, grubby little film that wallows in the worst aspects of human behaviour, offering no redeeming values at all.
