The Seth Rogen in Observe and Report is not the Seth Rogen we have come to know and love. Gone is the adorably scruffy slacker of Knocked Up or Zack and Miri Make a Porno, with his endearing, stuttering laugh. In his place is Ronnie Barnhardt, a meaty sociopath proud to call himself head of security at Forest Ridge Mall. Rogen's performance is admirable; he plays the character straight, like Travis Bickle if his problems had been shoplifters and streakers instead of presidential politics. It's a brave performance, one which Rogen is wholly committed to. Unfortunately, the material lets him down.
Writer-director Jody Hill gained a cult following with his 2006 debut The Foot Fist Way, and this year had a successful first season with his HBO sitcom Eastbound & Down. I don't have much knowledge of those two; The Foot Fist Way is still unseen by me, and I stopped watching Eastbound & Down after the boring, laughless pilot episode. But now having seen Observe and Report, I'm beginning to notice a connecting theme. Hill takes detestable people, makes them simultaneously self-loathing and self-aggrandizing anti-heroes, and comes up with products as disturbed as their protagonists. He just forgets to make them funny.
Observe and Report is dark comedy at its darkest: heroin injections, check; coke snorting, check; brutal crackhead beatdowns, check. But there's a fine line between dark and mean-spirited, and Hill straddles it so precariously that it becomes something of an endurance test. At its best, as when Ronnie stands up for his mall by taking on a group of cops in spectacularly violent fashion, it's very amusing; at its worst, like when Ronnie is humiliated for wanting to be a police officer, it's squirm-inducing.
This is, of course, the point. But since Hill largely cops out on exploring the psychological depth of Rogen's performance, he ends up relying too much on simple shock value. Plotlines are lazily dropped throughout the movie, for seemingly little reason other than mere convenience. The film's focal point is Ronnie's infatuation — nay, obsession — with Brandi, the trashy bitch who works at the cosmetics counter, played by Anna Faris, an actress who insists on stubbornly playing the same shrill note in every one of her movies. When Brandi is assaulted by a serial flasher on the mall grounds, Ronnie takes it up as his duty to stop him, save the day, and be accepted as a real man in the eyes of everyone he knows, especially Brandi. But Brandi goes missing for much of the second half of the movie, and while I will never complain about being relieved of Faris's "screen presence," it doesn't make much sense from a storytelling point of view.
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