OBSERVE AND REPORT Review
Prowling around an anonymous shopping mall in an anonymous US city, Ronnie Barnhardt resembles an American Black Bear.
As pitilessly embodied by Seth Rogen in Jody Hill's Observe and Report, Ronnie looks harmless from a distance: more fat than muscle, close-cropped hair, ill-fitting blue uniform, leisurely, uneven gait. He looks like a cartoon character -- Yogi Bear, maybe. Up close, it's a different story. He's big and burly. His eyes narrow when he talks. He quickly explodes into anger, even without provocation, and then, as his emotions subside, he tries to cover up with a phony smile that's all teeth.
He's 90% repellant male, 5% charming scoundrel, and 5% dangerous animal.
Ronnie is the type of character that you can sort of believe would patiently wait hours for his dream girl, Brandi (Anna Faris), to show up for their first date. He's so shallow that he's attracted to her once beautiful, now haggard appearance as 'the prettiest woman in the mall, and maybe the universe,' and his opinion is not shaken by her words or actions. She's clearly drunk before their late date begins, puking on the lawn in front of her house, but he happily kisses her: "I accept you."
Everything in Ronnie's world is about Ronnie. So after Brandi drinks herself into oblivion on their date, he takes her home and they end up in bed together. She passes out while they're copulating, but he doesn't even notice right away: he's too busy concentrating on himself.
A better man would not have taken advantage of the drunken Brandi, but Ronnie is obviously a horrid man. Or is he? The film sends mixed signals: he accuses a mall vendor of being a terrorist or, at minimum, some kind of criminal, simply because he's Middle Eastern, yet has no problem working with fellow mall cops of other races, the Latino Dennis (Michael Peña) and Asian twin brothers (John Yuen and Matt Yuen). He objectifies women, yet speaks kindly to Nell (Collette Wolfe), a cute restaurant worker who serves him free coffee every morning, to the point that Nell develops a crush on him. As a mall cop, he's assumed to be unable to qualify as "a real cop," yet when he tries to quality for the police academy, he demonstrates brutish physical abilities and, later, in a confrontation with a street gang, he takes pleasure in displaying master fighting skills and inflicting punishment on wrongdoers.
To further complicate matters to a disturbing end, Ronnie's own crush on Brandi could have Oedipal implications. His lives with his Mom (Celia Weston), a pathetic alcoholic resigned to her own shortcomings. With no father figure in sight, it's Ronnie who cares for his Mom. Is that why Brandi becomes more attractive to Ronnie the more she drinks?
Ronnie could be considered an illegitimate cousin of Fred Simmons, the self-deluding character played by Danny McBride in The Foot Fist Way. In that film, written by McBride, Hill, and Ben Best, and directed by Hill, Fred was a not very talented Tae Kwon Do instructor with an unfaithful wife and no real friends who eventually begins to suffer from self-doubt. It was filled with cheap physical gags and a lead character so far over-the-top in his socially incorrect behavior that it was difficult to take offense.
Ronnie has, perhaps, one or two more redeeming factors, but Observe and Report, as a whole, doesn't connect as well with the dark psyche of America. For one thing, it's very difficult to suss out exactly what lines Ronnie's morality follows. He's not amoral; there are certain things he won't do, but it's not clear why this is OK and that is evil.
We could write it off to "he's nuts," but that leads to a second quandry: Ronnie is on some kind of medication. Which means that he, or somebody else, was sufficiently concerned to seek out medical advice at some point. We're led to believe that, in the early part of the story, Ronnie is taking his meds. Thus, when he stops taking them, we expect him to really go off the deep end. That kinda sorta happens, but not to the extreme degree that we would expect. Were the meds added to the script to try and explain away his behavior? Or excuse it?
The climactic scenes are problematic as well, obviously meant to be received as some kind of ironic, cynical, triumphant victory, though not very convincing in the way it's laid out.
Observe and Report inspires a fair amount of uncomfortable laughter and perhaps an equal measure of puzzled bemusement at some of the jokes and gags that should be funny but fall flat; overall, it left more of a sour taste in my mouth than did The Foot Fist Way.
Seth Rogen is just fine. Michael Peña is very good as Ronnie's second-in-command, Ray Liotta is funny as a slow-boiling "real cop," Celia Weston adds a note of wrinkled grace to her scenes, and Collette Wolfe is very cute and winsome in a difficult role.
