Observe and Report

Director: Jody Hill
Starring: Seth Rogen and Anna Faris
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 86 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011

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Rating notes: nudity, sexual references, coarse language, drug use and violence

Not sure. That’s the immediate answer I would offer to someone asking me what the film was like. It’s also the answer to how I felt about the film.

Seth Rogen has specialised in a number of raunchy and raucous comedies (Knocked Up, Pineapple Express, Zach and Miri). He can bring an intelligent stupidity to his roles as well as some beneath-the-surface sympathy. They’re both here in this film – but which is the real character of Ronnie Barnhardt, the mall security guard chief that he plays? Some have commented that he is ‘bi-polar’ but I don’t think that is a point that the writer-director, Jody Hill, wants to make. Speaking of Jody Hill, he has said that he wanted to make Taxi Driver as a comedy. Not sure about that either, but it is a useful, even stimulating suggestion.

The reason for listening to this suggestion is that Ronnie Barnhardt, like de Niro’s Travis Bickle, the taxi driver, is a loner, despite living with his unpredictable drinking mother (Celia Weston in an offbeat role) and despite commanding the loyalty of his deputy, Hispanic Denis (Michael Pena cleverly funny) and Asian American twin assistant guards. Actually, like the taxi driver, he is a blindly patriotic American with a penchant for violent laying down of the law. While he does have comic moments, Ronnie seems to be an intended caricature of the American Right with extreme views on law and order, racist prejudices because of the war on terror (he calls one of the shop owners in the mall Saddam because of his looks), a might-is-right approach to life.

What is it with American films this year and malls? Kevin James was pleasantly innocent as Paul Blart, Mall Cop. Observe and Report is similar in plot in many ways but with these sinister overtones. Anna Farris who can do IQ-impaired blondes is really rather nasty here – Colette Wolfe, whose leg is in plaster, mocked by fellow workers, is the sympathetic foil for Ronnie.

What emphasises this dichotomy in Ronnie’s good nature and his vigilante tendencies – which he does have a chance to indulge when the police deliberately abandon him in a very tough neighbourhood where he is able to beat up all the drug dealing assailants – is the casting of Ray Liotta as the detective investigating robberies as well as a flasher at the mall. Liotta can do over-the-top ranting better than most and does a bit of indulging here: which makes Ronnie a little bit more sympathetic but then makes us realise that Ronnie has this kind of potential and wants to fulfil it. His speech to the psychologist for his test for admission to the police academy needs listening to.

Despite being unsure, I would come down on the side of this film not being variation on the usual Seth Rogen comedies but see it, rather, as a very black comedy and satire on some of the more fascist tenets of the Right (actually former president Bush might enjoy it while taking it rather literally).