Observe and Report (*1/2)

When I saw twenty minutes of Paul Blart: Mall Cop, I thought surely this would be the year’s worst movie about a pudgy security guard. Now I think that this effort from Jody Hill, also the creator of HBO’s Eastbound & Down, may have reached an unexpected new low.

Seth Rogen, who usually plays amiable slackers, reveals unexpected depths (signaled by his close-cropped hairstyle). As a self-aggrandizing, bipolar head of mall security, he’s downright obnoxious most of the time. Like Paul Blart, he has a thing for a mall employee (Anna Faris), but she’s pretty obnoxious too. Ray Liotta plays his nemesis, a cop he’s trying to outsmart in solving the case of a parking-lot flasher. Hard to know who to root for, but our hero’s technique is to blame it on the dark-skinned Muslim guy who has a restraining order on him.

I’m not saying a comedy can’t have a unlikeable main character (see Bad Santa), but it shouldn’t also ask the audience to find him charming, as (I think) Hill does. And I’m not saying a comedy needs to have documentary realism, but if it’s going to exaggerate it should, you know, have a point. Why is it funny that Faris’s character is so distraught after being flashed that she can’t walk and has to be carried? Or that the trigger-happy schmuck who carries her wouldn’t have gotten hired to be a 7-11 manager, let alone a security head? (To be fair, it’s apparently such a small mall that there are only four other guards.) And I’m not saying that drug abuse, male frontal nudity, and rampant profanity can’t be funny, but it should look like there was a thought behind the smut besides, hey look, it’s an R-rated comedy.

Hill seems so intent on avoiding the sappy family-movie predictability of a Paul Blart that he’s made something that, while mostly not formulaic, is genuinely disagreeable. Possibly if you mashed up the two movies they would, like matter meeting antimatter, explode and produce something both novel and funny. It’s a tough call whether this was more odious than Martin Lawrence’s National Security, but I’ll be on my, ahem, guard for any more movies from this comedy subgenre.

Half a point for occasionally being funny, as when Celia Weston, as the rent-a-cop’s drunken mom, tells him that, yes, it probably was his fault that Dad left them.

IMDB link

viewed at Riverview and reviewed 4/27/09