I assume that Jody Hill wrote Observe and Report as a vehicle for Danny McBride, the comedian who starred in his first film The Foot Fist Way as well as his HBO series Eastbound and Down. Mall cop Ronnie Barnhardt, the main character of Observe and Report, is another one of Hill and McBride’s patented low-rent alpha males, unpleasant, overweight jerks abusing every bit of the limited authority society has seen fit to award them, universally disliked (save for a small number of low-IQ underlings) but completely oblivious to the repellent effect their personality has on the world around them. McBride excels at playing these types of guys, but while I admire his fearless refusal to endow them with even the slightest of redeeming features, his commitment results in characters so toxic they’re practically unendurable — even for someone like me, who thinks there’s nothing funnier than awkwardness and discomfort, not even dick jokes. (Maybe that’s why Eastbound and Down worked for me when The Foot Fist Way didn’t — it parceled McBride’s performance into manageable half-hour chunks. Plus, it contained a lot of dick jokes.)McBride has a cameo role in one of Observe and Report’s best scenes. Furious with Ronnie’s constant interfering with his investigation of a series of crimes at the mall, a real cop named Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta) takes him on a “ride-along,” then deposits him in the city’s worst neighbourhood. Inevitably, Ronnie is quickly surrounded by a gang of glowering drug dealers led by McBride, a tough so proud of his drug-dealing 10-year-old son that he got his face tattooed on his chest. I don’t know if studio pressure forced Hill to make the film without McBride in the lead, but thank God he caved: the fact that Ronnie is played by Seth Rogen, the man whose face practically symbolizes laid-back slacker harmlessness, makes it all the more hilarious when Ronnie pulls a baton out from his pantleg and proceeds to beat the thugs up so quickly and ruthlessly as Oldboy dispatching that hallway full of attackers.
That scene is the first hint that Ronnie may be more than a deluded, pathetic jerk still living at home with his alcoholic mother (a hilarious Celia Weston), and that he might actually be dangerously crazy. He’s a cross between that cop John C. Reilly played in Magnolia, constantly monologuing to an imaginary Cops camera crew about the duties of being in law enforcement... and Travis Bickle, dreaming of the day when a cleansing rain will come along to wash all the scum off the streets. (Or at least get rid of that Arab guy at the lotion kiosk who he’s convinced is secretly plotting with Al-Qaida to blow up the Chick Fil-A.)
And then, about an hour or so into the film, when Ronnie and his second-in-command Dennis (Michael Peña) embark on a drug-fueled orgy of pointless mall destruction, you start to suspect that Observe and Report might be going as insane as Ronnie. When Ronnie tries to join the police force but fails the psychological exam — turns out it’s not a good idea to mime blowing your interviewer’s head off with a shotgun — you start to wonder if this will be the first Hollywood comedy that ends with its main character shooting all of his co-workers before getting gunned down by a SWAT team.That doesn’t happen, but the film’s actual climax is nearly as jaw-dropping.
It's a sloppy movie in a lot of ways. I wish Hill hadn’t used a pair of dorky-looking Asian twin brothers as a recurring sight gag, and there’s something tonally off about the (studio-mandated? ironic? subversive?) happy ending. It would also have been nice if he’d done more with a couple of the supporting characters, especially the wary-looking security recruit played by Jesse Plemons (who’s so terrific as Landry on Friday Night Lights).
On the other hand, Hill gives Anna Faris one of her best-ever film roles, as a cosmetics salesgirl who goes on a pity date with Ronnie, only to drink herself nearly unconscious — smash-cut to her lying in bed, bleary-eyed, a vomit stain on her pillow, with Ronnie on top of her, pounding away. I’m trying to come up with a way of explaining why this scene is hilarious instead of just plain offensive, and I keep coming up short. Certainly, the sheer awfulness of the scenario gets a shock laugh — that vomit stain is really quite the touch! But I think part of it has to do with Faris’ blissful drunk routine in the scenes leading up to it — I like how she makes sure Ronnie is picking up the tab, and only then starts pounding back tequila shots like there’s no tomorrow. Faris makes you believe in this woman, who can blast the filthiest rap song imaginable from her car stereo and still become traumatized when a flasher exposes himself to her. She’s a woman who can wake up in the middle of getting date-raped and yell at the guy for stopping.
The key scene in Observe and Report may be the one where Detective Harrison tells Ronnie his application to attend the police academy has been rejected. There’s nothing he’d rather do at this point in the film than crush Ronnie’s dreams — his partner is even hiding in a closet so he can eavesdrop on the whole delicious scene. And Ronnie is crushed. Devastated, in fact. So much so that the detective walks out of the closet before the conversation is even over. “I thought this was going to be funny,” he says sheepishly, “but actually it’s just sad. So... uh... I’m going to leave now.”
I suspect that might be most audience members’ reaction to Observe and Report as well. How big can the market possibly be for Jody Hill’s brand of misanthropic comedy? The box office reports will be well worth observing.
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