Observe and Report finally confirms two long-running suspicions I have held about Seth Rogen. One is that there is a continual mean streak to the clueless schlub he constantly plays. The other is that his depth of range to play such a character does not go very far beyond that of an average sketch on SNL. Thus, when he is given considerably darker comedic material to work with, as he is here, he and the filmmakers make us feel squirmy rather than unsettlingly amused.
Now I am not saying that one cannot make a good black comedy about Rogen's one-track mind security guard, Ronnie Barnhardt, whom some have described as Paul Blart: Mall Cop from earlier this year filtered through the mind of Travis Bickle. In fact, a character similar to that of Bickle in Taxi Driver was already seen through morbidly comedic lenses by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro in The King of Comedy. But good comedy requires the basis of truth and heart in its backbone and first-time writer/director Jody Hill lacks the skill to connect the laughs with the would-be serious elements of character empathy. Hence, we cringe at some of the supposedly funny elements that are based entirely on shock value and scratch our heads when it tries to take itself seriously with the antihero's bipolar disorder.
We first meet Ronnie Barnhardt as he takes his job as head of security at a shopping mall very, very seriously. A flasher has been on the loose in the parking lot and when he ends up harassing Ronnie's long-time crush, Brandi (Anna Faris), who works at a cosmetic stand at a mall, Ronnie makes it his personal mission to find this flasher. The mall's CEO, Mark (Dan Bakkedahl), however, does not really trust Ronnie and since it is a criminal matter, he calls in Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta) to handle the case. But then when a store robbery takes place during the mall's closing hours, Ronnie, who has had dreams of being a real police officer, recruits his own “task force” consisting of his right-hand man, Dennis (Michael Peňa) and Asian twins, John and Matt Yuen (John and Matt Yuan). There is also Nell (Collette Wolfe), a coffee and donut shop worker who gets mocked by her fellow employees for merely being a little immobile due to a cast around her leg.
.jpg?t=20120527181101)
Article comments