Skip to main contentRonnie Barnhardt, security guard extraordinaire, waddles into his final interview for the police academy flush with confidence. He has aced his physical tryouts, and silenced the department therapist with a bombshell proclamation: "I am pleased to announce I am currently off all prescription medications." The police detective is also pleased to inform Ronnie that he will never be a cop. He reads from the psychological report: "Mr. Barnhardt shows warning signs of delusion." (Ronnie, true to form, replies that he cannot see how this is possible.) Another officer emerges from the storage closet, where he had hidden to snicker. "I thought this was going to be funny," he says, "but it's actually sort of sad."
It may also seem somewhat familiar. Every so often, Hollywood indulges in a spell of doubling: two simultaneous volcano movies, say, or two underage vampires. This year, it's synchronized rent-a-cops. In January, the farce Paul Blart: Mall Cop became a perplexing hit, as families delighted to the timeless vision of Kevin James falling off a Segway. Barely has the stitch in America's collective side had time to heal when along sidles Observe and Report with Seth Rogen in the role of Ronnie, a shopping-plaza security chief who, like his predecessor Mr. Blart, pines for a kiosk saleslady, pursues a mysterious criminal interloper, battles a police-detective rival and turns rogue to protect his venerated mall.
It's best to dispense with these plentiful but superficial echoes up front, because Observe and Report is in fact the diseased fulfillment of a sensibility director Jody Hill was honing long before anyone's Blartistic ambitions were unleashed. Hill, a graduate of the same North Carolina college that produced David Gordon Green, spent two years shopping around a shoestring-budget slapstick named The Foot Fist Way, starring Danny McBride as a preening tae kwon do instructor. Will Ferrell recognized its promise and gave Hill an HBO series—starring McBride as an ex-Major League pitcher—called Eastbound and Down. The sitcom and the movie share proud hillbilly washouts as heroes, as well an urge for excess edging into antisocial anarchy. Lovably deluded protagonists are customary in recent comedy, but Hill pushes his bad boys into blithe sociopathy. They worm their way into viewers' affections through a shameless lack of decency or consideration.
McBride's characters are cuddly lunks compared to Ronnie Barnhardt. Seth Rogen is impeccably cast in this role, which takes his oafish persona and transforms it into a food-court-fueled tub of fascist thuggery. Ronnie is a man with a dream, and it does not trouble him that this dream ends with half the people in the world dead and the other half prostrate at his feet. He is selectively racist and homophobic (somehow noticing neither quality in his second-in-command, a hilariously lisping Michael Peña), dotes on his incapacitated alcoholic of a mother (Celia Weston), and transfers that fixation onto the local cosmetics slattern (Anna Faris). She has been menaced by a parking-lot flasher—an affront to Ronnie on all levels, made exponentially greater by the intrusion of an actual policeman (Ray Liotta). As his responses grow as ineffective as they are out of proportion, it is possible to feel a squirmy sympathy for Ronnie: Doesn't even this jerk deserve a little justice?
And then Liotta's exasperated detective deposits Ronnie outside the mall, on the most dangerous sidewalk in the city, where he reveals that he is uncowed, resourceful and completely insane. (Here is where he first entertains the notion that he might be law-enforcement material: "There are six dead crackheads as proof," he brags.) From there, Observe and Report walks an unsteady line, daring itself to unleash the full Ronnie Barnhardt experience. (Snorting bumps of coke, then assaulting loitering kids with their own skateboards, is a half measure.) The movie is patchy, if often inspired, until its final 10 minutes, which are a gleeful affront—as daring and shocking as any comedy has been in years. I thought it was going to be funny, but it's actually sort of horrifying. And because of that, yes, it's spectacularly funny.
: Observe and Report is rated R. It opens Friday at Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, Cornelius, Division, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard and Wilsonville.
WWeek 2015