Every once and a while, after a long week of stress and analyzing films that are worth my time, I like to kick back and watch a horribly dumb movie as a nice little palette cleanser. Luckily for me, Jody Hill's Observe and Report is available on Netflix and this was the perfect film to encapsulate that mindless absurdity. This movie is a terribly offensive and completely uninspired underdog film about a mall security guard who aspires to become something greater. Containing all of the aged, crude humor that one would expect from Seth Rogen at this point in his career, this movie really does have it all. Yet despite every little detail of what's wrong with this film, there is no doubt that it is still a mildly enjoyable watch when you need to shut your brain off for a good hour and a half.
Ronnie (Seth Rogen) is the bipolar head of security at a local shopping mall at which a perverted streaker has been recently exposing himself to innocent women. As Ronnie tries to track down and find the suspect, he is faced with a much bigger challenge of balancing his own ego with that of the new Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta), who has been assigned to the case. As with most Seth Rogen comedies, they may be full of dumb humor but they have a simple and relatively straightforward plot. There are so many different subplots going on throughout this film that made it incredibly hard to follow. It was obvious that Rogen and his longtime writing partner Evan Goldberg were not involved in the scripting process of this film because it would have frankly been much better. Jody Hill's writing and directing are awful and lead this movie into such an unnecessary path of ambiguity. This movie could not decide which plot it wanted to follow - whether it be Ronnie's dedication to finding the mall exposer or his dedication to becoming an actual police officer (or the dozen other, mini-plotlines that were never fully explored). Because of this, the writing just felt really lazy throughout this whole movie and very uninspired. There is no source material that I could tell this movie was based on and there definitely wasn't a clear message.
The performances in this film surely weren't anything to write home about either. Rogen does a good job of holding his own the best he can and the fact that the script was completely all over the place paved the way for his character being bipolar. Which begs the question of whether his bipolarity was actually part of the script or just arose due to the messy character motivations and development. Liotta plays the typical hardass, this time in the form of a detective also set to close the mall exposer case. Michael Peña, Anna Faris, Jesse Plemons, Colette Wolfe, Aziz Ansari, and Patton Oswalt also star in this film, but none of them were ever particularly scene-stealing. This kind of cast is honestly exactly what I would expect from a mismatched film such as this, but it's nice to see how far all of these artists have come since their more low-brow days in movies of this genre.
The humor that Hill wrote throughout this movie is expectedly the worst piece of this whole production. In films written by Rogen and Goldberg, there at least is always a trend in the humor and jokes that stay funny and come full-circle. In Observe and Report, there was nothing but loud and obnoxious, derogatory humor. The majority of the cheap laughs in this film come from characters yelling obscenities and offensive slurs at each other while getting other laughs from cheap violence and "deviant" sexual behavior. Along with the romanticization of alcohol and drug abuse with Anna Faris' character, this movie's humor is just all-around lazy. This film has not aged well at all and it's offputting to think that this film only came out ten years ago with the type of humor that it has. However, I'm at least glad to see that our culture has evolved to not be complacent with writing like this.
Observe and Report is quite a wild ride of a film and unfortunately, not in a good way. The multiple, confusing plotlines and the entire cast of unlikable characters make this movie such an interesting piece to analyze. And when I say interesting, I really mean "easy to tear down." I love you Seth Rogen, but there's a reason why audiences tend to focus on the current and much better period of your career.
My Rating: ★½
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