Review and news hub for movies, music and video games

Movie:		5.0
Picture:		7.0
Sound:		7.0
Extras:		5.0
Score:		6.0

Director(s):	Jody Hill
Writer(s):	Jody Hill
Starring:	Anna Faris • Jesse Plemons • Michael Pena • Ray Liotta • Seth Rogen
Genre:	Comedy
Website:	http://observe-and-report.warnerbros.com/dvd/index.html
Release Date:	September 22, 2009
Rated:

List Price:	Blu-ray - $24.99
Amazon:

It’s somewhat tough to describe the tingle of anticipation we felt as we entered the screening of Observe and Report back in May having hungrily consumed the online buzz surrounding it. “Quite unlike anything you’ve ever seen” was what we had been led to believe; a film that offered a dark and delirious blend of black comedy and shocking violence from the man who brought us The Foot Fist Way. Imagine our disappointment then after about twenty minutes as we slowly realized that what we were witnessing was not the birth of comedy not as we know it, but the death of writer/director Jody Hill’s short-term big studio career.

You can certainly see what Hill was aiming at. After all, in the post-Will Ferrell era the idea of another comedy centered around an inept egotist with a massively inflated and yet entirely unjustified sense of self-worth might strike you as so far, so formula. But as Hill demonstrated with his breakout debut, the aforementioned The Foot Fist Way, he has a propensity to push the envelope, displaying a penchant for offering up brutality for belly laughs. Danny McBride playing a martial arts instructor who can’t control his temper can get away with that because he’s clearly a harmless buffoon who, when challenged, will ultimately cower. Seth Rogen playing a bullish bi-polar case who is off his meds simply cannot.

Angry and given to fits of paranoid delusion, head of mall security Ronnie Barnhardt is the lord and master of all he surveys; even if that translates to shoplifters, old people power-walking, and fatties congregating around the ice cream fountain. When a serial flasher invades his domain, Ronnie seizes his chance to show off his law enforcement skills to the decidedly unimpressed Detective Harrison (a wasted Ray Liotta) and make-up counter-employed girl of his dreams Brandi (Anna Faris showing why she is one of comedy’s brightest stars). Mustering his troops in the form of sycophantic lieutenant Dennis (Michael Pena), and gun nuts John and Matt (John Yuan and Matt Yuan), Ronnie sets about restoring order with an iron fist (typically aimed at someone’s face). And therein lies the problem.

Violence in and of itself – even that which occurs on screen – is not funny. Rather it’s up to the director to make it funny. But Jody Hill’s lack of stylistic smarts combined with Rogen’s misguided decision to play it absolutely straight offer the viewer no hyper-reality buffer zone to relax into. Given authority, shown to be more than capable of handling himself physically, and shot in unrelenting close-up by Hill, Rogen’s Ronnie actually comes over as genuinely threatening, leaving the audience unsure how to react beyond nervous tittering – a catastrophic misstep for any comedy.

Hill’s leave-well-enough-alone strategy invites us to watch Ronnie fail to achieve his aspiration of joining the police force (on psychological grounds) and, now off his meds thanks to a brief one-nighter with Brandi that’s tantamount to a date rape gag, slips further and further away from reality. The Taxi Driver comparisons are obvious, and that’s clearly what Rogen is shooting for in gleefully blowing away paper targets on the range combined with a grim voiceover declaring his intention to purge the mall of the “human sewage” that he feels is seeping into it. But at no point does Hill offer any indication, either through the script or his flat, functional direction, as to why any of this is supposed to be funny. Rather he simply presents Ronnie engaging in a slew of ultra-violent antics – pounding on skateboarders, brutalizing mall staff, tasering customers – and just expects us to laugh at them. Well sorry, but we need more than that.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it were even in service to the story. But in fact it’s the shockingly OTT smackdowns that prevent any real story that we can get invested in from emerging. We’re expected to believe that not only would Det. Harrison tolerate Ronnie’s interference for even a second, but that he would actively seek to place him in harms way by dropping him off with some tooled up crackheads, just to make a point. Or that Ronnie would still be walking around a free man after getting into a Matrix Reloaded style face-off with two-dozen police officers. The violence not only serves no comedic purpose, it actively prevents the formation of a logical narrative.

Most bizarrely of all is the single solitary scene, in which Hill ironically and unintentionally manages to sum up the collective failings of Observe and Report all on his own. In this scene Det. Harrison calls Ronnie into his office so he can delight in informing him that he flunked the police entrance exam, while his partner hides in the closet to listen in on the giggle. As Harrison is midswing into bringing the hammer down on Ronnie’s dreams and his eyes begin to glass, Harrison’s partner reemerges and skulks out of the room a little bit ashamed of himself, declaring: “You know what, I thought this was going to be funny, but it’s actually just kind of sad.”

Blu-ray Bonus Features

Extra features include the option of a picture-in-picture commentary track from writer/director Jody Hill, Seth Rogen, and Anna Faris, which is actually far more amusing than the movie itself. There are a handful of throwaway deleted scenes and a gag reel. Also included is a digital copy and a deliberately shoddy, overly dramatized spoof recruitment video for mall security, which is amusing enough to sit through once.