How Jody Hill's second feature film, Observe and Report, got made at all is something of an insane miracle let alone by a major studio by Warner brothers. Perhaps it was all thanks to Seth Rogen, who recently acted with Hill's main guy Danny McBride in Pineapple Express, who got it green-lit. Because, frankly, this is such a ballsy and weird "comedy" that rests in a nether-region of Paul Blart: Mall Cop, One Hour Photo, and any given Seth Rogen vehicle comedy. It's in simplest terms about a mall cop (or "head of security") who is bi-polar, thinking he's on track to become an actual police officer, trying to track down a flasher who keeps exposing his privates to any women in sight, and quickly goes even MORE bug-f*** crazy when he forgets to take his pills. It's one of the oddest birds in cinema of the year.
And I can't say I exactly "enjoyed" myself, at least in the same way I did with previous Seth Rogen vehicles. This isn't Knocked Up or Zack and Miri Make a Porno where Rogen was this likable guy that the supposed schleps in the audience could identify with him in situations. Ronnie Bernhardt is the kind of guy who if he wasn't a screw-loose might almost be a kind of enthusiastic bad-ass. But as he is he is pushy, off-putting, obscene, at one point an arguable date raper, and is obsessed with using guns over his mace and tazer. He has a drunk mom, one of those almost conventional female things going on where he's "macking" on the ditsy cosmetics girl (Anna Faris) while the happy but tortured-for-her-broken-ankle girl working behind the bakery (Collette Wolf) that gets really bizarre, and a final thirty minutes that... I'll just leave it as it is here.
Suffice to say it's actually brave for Rogen to take on this character and not make us like him, at all, in the slightest. He may even have helped with some of the ad-libbing (one of the funniest scenes is between himself and a brown-skinned individual with a constant "F-you" back-and-forth where the pitch of their two-word insults get lower and lower), and if nothing else he is quite watchable in the role of Ronnie. What works against the movie is that it usually doesn't know what it exactly wants to be, and the director's ambitions get ahead of him. It's a comedy but at the least as dark as a black hole, and as a drama about a psychotic on the edge it gets too crude and obvious with white trash bits. It has a similar level of awkward tension fused with a sense of humor that is meant to illicit laughs from the protagonist's chutzpah and go-for-broke quality like Hill's The Foot Fist Way, maybe its only real link.
To be fair, I wasn't the biggest fan of that film, even as I can understand its appeal as a cult favorite. Maybe Observe and Report will get that too. I was astonished at times where the film went to with taking its character's exploits to a dangerous but somewhat logical conclusion. Other times I did indeed laugh a good deal, either from a moment of real randomness (I did like the joke on the twin Asian guards, "You're my infantry, if I lose one, God gives me another"). I can't say I exactly liked the movie a good deal, but I do respect it. It will split an audience as to what the hell it even is, or if it's as funny as it might be or if it follows its Taxi Driver roots to full-tilt. It's a true-blue curio, and I wouldn't either recommend it or tell you it's comedy poison.
And I can't say I exactly "enjoyed" myself, at least in the same way I did with previous Seth Rogen vehicles. This isn't Knocked Up or Zack and Miri Make a Porno where Rogen was this likable guy that the supposed schleps in the audience could identify with him in situations. Ronnie Bernhardt is the kind of guy who if he wasn't a screw-loose might almost be a kind of enthusiastic bad-ass. But as he is he is pushy, off-putting, obscene, at one point an arguable date raper, and is obsessed with using guns over his mace and tazer. He has a drunk mom, one of those almost conventional female things going on where he's "macking" on the ditsy cosmetics girl (Anna Faris) while the happy but tortured-for-her-broken-ankle girl working behind the bakery (Collette Wolf) that gets really bizarre, and a final thirty minutes that... I'll just leave it as it is here.
Suffice to say it's actually brave for Rogen to take on this character and not make us like him, at all, in the slightest. He may even have helped with some of the ad-libbing (one of the funniest scenes is between himself and a brown-skinned individual with a constant "F-you" back-and-forth where the pitch of their two-word insults get lower and lower), and if nothing else he is quite watchable in the role of Ronnie. What works against the movie is that it usually doesn't know what it exactly wants to be, and the director's ambitions get ahead of him. It's a comedy but at the least as dark as a black hole, and as a drama about a psychotic on the edge it gets too crude and obvious with white trash bits. It has a similar level of awkward tension fused with a sense of humor that is meant to illicit laughs from the protagonist's chutzpah and go-for-broke quality like Hill's The Foot Fist Way, maybe its only real link.
To be fair, I wasn't the biggest fan of that film, even as I can understand its appeal as a cult favorite. Maybe Observe and Report will get that too. I was astonished at times where the film went to with taking its character's exploits to a dangerous but somewhat logical conclusion. Other times I did indeed laugh a good deal, either from a moment of real randomness (I did like the joke on the twin Asian guards, "You're my infantry, if I lose one, God gives me another"). I can't say I exactly liked the movie a good deal, but I do respect it. It will split an audience as to what the hell it even is, or if it's as funny as it might be or if it follows its Taxi Driver roots to full-tilt. It's a true-blue curio, and I wouldn't either recommend it or tell you it's comedy poison.