From today's Oregonian....
Only three projects in, writer/director Jody Hill has carved out his turf: All his comedies are darkly funny ballads saluting delusional losers in America's heartland.
Whether it's Danny McBride's egomaniac taekwondo instructor in "The Foot Fist Way"; McBride's mullet-rocking ex-baseballer in HBO's "Eastbound & Down"; or, now, Seth Rogen's mentally ill mall-cop in "Observe and Report," Hill's characters are a bit like Wes Anderson's in that they're strivers with irrational self-confidence. The key difference is that Hill's working-class strivers would give wedgies to Anderson's prep-school strivers while doing cookies all over Anderson's preciously art-directed lawns.
"Observe and Report" opens with an awesome slo-mo montage of middle-class patrons at an Albuquerque mall before finally settling on Head of Mall Security Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen). Ronnie, like all of Hill's lead characters, is ignorant, obsessive and delusional. This time, he's also clinically bipolar. Ronnie wears a calculator watch and says "Boom!" way too frequently for comfort. Mall employees have restraining orders against him. He's also surrounded by enablers -- including a meek boss, a loyal team of gun-nut subordinates and a drunk mother (Celia Weston) -- who allow him to maintain the self-created myth that he's "getting God's work done" as a rent-a-cop.
His world starts falling out from under him when a serial flasher targets women at the mall and Ronnie imagines himself the equal of the police detective (Ray Liotta) investigating the case. "Part of me thinks this disgusting pervert is the best thing that ever happened to me," says Ronnie, before embarking on a series of overreaching moves that include running his own rogue investigation, applying for the police force, going off his meds and asking out the party-hearty ditz who works the makeup counter (Anna Faris).
That story synopsis could easily describe a pitch-black indie drama instead of a pitch-black low-budget comedy. While "Observe and Report" does toe the tidy studio-comedy line at some key moments and can't quite settle on how implausible it's going to be, I loved how Hill frequently took things much, much further than expected -- occasionally to scary places. Ronnie's mom is a slurring, on-the-floor drunk, not the harmless Hollywood-comedy variety, and the film's violence gets shockingly brutal. This is one of those comedies where the humor lies in the audacity of tone and character rather than any particular sight gag or one-liner. (Same with "Foot Fist Way," which is absolutely worth your rental dollar.)
Rogen is a little one-note for a long stretch of movie (and kind of seems like he's doing a Danny McBride impression at times), but he's quite good in the crucial final third, when Hill takes Ronnie on a journey of genuine, not movie-cute, psychosis -- a bipolar roller-coaster of a character arc. In fact, Hill makes surprising choices with his characters nearly all the way through. Ronny isn't a stereotypical buffoon, for starters; he's actually a surprisingly nimble hand-to-hand combatant, as demonstrated in one fight scene with police batons that owes more than a little to "Oldboy" (and actually makes me think Rogen could work as The Green Hornet).
Hill also gives weird and/or moving mini-monologues to supporting characters played by Michael Peña and Collette Wolfe. And Anna Faris just kills as a particular kind of trashy suburban party girl who's only a few years away from paying for her excesses for the rest of her life. (She also may have found the single funniest possible way in which to deliver the line, "Physically? Yes. Psychologically? Noooo!")
Also, for all the crassness I've catalogued above, it's worth noting that North Carolina-born Hill shares a key quality with "King of the Hill" creator Mike Judge: He's not condescending toward his Middle American characters or culture. Despite "Observe and Report"'s occasional brutality, there's a core of empathy in Hill's work that you'd never find in a patronizing fat-guy/hot-wife sitcom produced on the coast (or, for that matter, "Paul Blart: Mall Cop"). Hill takes Ronnie to alarming psychological places, but he also clearly finds Ronnie sort of weirdly magnificent in his heroic failure. (The same is true of the characters Hill created with Danny McBride, who could almost be described as Hill's muse.)
I'm not sure how many lovable schlubs Rogen agreed to play in Judd Apatow comedies to get this dark little piece made, but I'm delighted he took the risk. It mostly pays off.
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B; 86 minutes; rated R for pervasive language, graphic nudity, drug use, sexual content and violence.
'Observe and Report' (The Oregonian, Friday, April 10, 2009)
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