Observe and Report

In writer-director Jody Hill's "Observe and Report," head of mall security Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) takes in the world of the Forest Ridge Mall -- its speed walkers and shoplifters, its cinnamon bun shops and cosmetics counters -- through heavily medicated eyes. Ronnie heads a team of security guards, but the mall has its problems (robberies, a flasher) and Ronnie wants to keep the mall safe. As he says to a fellow mall employee, "It's actually my job to put myself in harm's way to protect weaker people like yourself ..."

Watching "Observe and Report," I couldn't help but think that if I were watching Ronnie's misadventures alone, I probably would have been deeply disturbed and disconcertingly ill at ease. Ronnie's a buffoon and a blowhard, but early on we see him doing some light target shooting, Travis Bickle-style, and relishing each round's impact, and we soon realize that he's actually dangerous. It would be one thing if Ronnie had delusions of grandeur; what Ronnie has could be better described as delusions of adequacy. But in a crowded theater, "Observe and Report" exists in a kind of bubble -- a collective, consensual space where we feel free to laugh at "jokes" that are bleak and black and grim and giddy. It's a strong, strange comedy that goes for the funny bone and the jugular.

As Ronnie, Rogen is surprisingly good, not just with the funny stuff, but also with conveying Ronnie's hunched-shouldered sadness, his idiot overconfidence, and even his unmedicated fury. (There are fights here as bloody and unsettling as anything in "Oldboy" or "Gangs of New York," but one of the minor miracles of "Observe and Report" is that they are so horribly over the top that all we can do, in fact, is laugh even as our guts go cold.) And Anna Faris, as Ronnie's dream girl, Brandi, steals every scene with her loud, loose idiocy. Brandi's a woman with nothing to say who nonetheless won't shut up. And Michael Peña plays Ronnie's least reliable lieutenant, Dennis, who kicks off a montage of bad behavior, where nips from a flask and loading-dock joints progress to mayhem, rails of coke being snorted off packing boxes and shooting up as Ronnie spirals down, a scene capped with a single, brilliant line that makes you bark laughter as if you were spitting up blood after being sucker-punched.

Looking at "Observe and Report" in the context of other Hill projects like "The Foot Fist Way" and "Eastbound & Down," I kind of get what Hill is exploring in his films and writing. "Observe and Report," like those earlier projects, paints a picture of all-American obliviousness, of star-spangled self-centeredness, of meathead machismo and bad behavior. At the same time, I can't help but wish Hill were exploring that toward some deeper end. It'd be fascinating to imagine Hill doing something like "Nashville," a small-town Southern saga of politics and pop culture in which he couldn't just jump to his fallback equation where fighting = funny, and seeing if he actually had something to say.

But who can think about things like this during what may be the worst date in human history, as a Cosby sweater-clad Ronnie is asked by Brandi to share some of the prescription pills he's popping: "I didn't know you partied like that, Ronnie." "I party like this every four to six hours ..." Like the later drugs-and-thugs montage with Peña, Ronnie and Brandi's date goes horrible places and then closes with a punch line that makes it somehow worse and better, so unbelievably wrong that it becomes right. And the film's finale, set, like the end of "Fight Club," and I don't think it's a coincidence, to the soaring, creepy strains of the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?," seals the deal with a giddy, gruesome act that shocks us even as it comes cleanly and rationally as the only possible conclusion to Ronnie's saga.

Bertolt Brecht, in "Life of Galileo," has one character say, "Pity the land without heroes," and Galileo reply, "No, pity the land that needs them." In "Observe and Report," we're asked to pity the man who wants to be a hero and the land that needs one, and we most assuredly would -- that is, if we weren't so damn busy laughing.