Observe and Report

(2009) dir. Jody Hill
viewed: 10/07/09

Though apparently intended to be a comedic Taxi Driver (1976), this Seth Rogan film about a mall cop with delusions of grandeur smacks more of pure misanthropy with a huge limitation on the chuckles.  Directed by Jody Hill, who came closer to capturing the hilarity and humanity of a dislikable schmuck with similar illusions of greatness in The Foot Fist Way (2006), which centered around a strip-mall Tae Kwon Do instructor whose ego outsized his reality.  Maybe the themes go even deeper between those two films, as I vaguely recall that violence and the doling-out of a smack down was redemptive in both films.

The film features the kind of humor that shoots far below the belt, with a loving alcoholic mother who soils herself, a trampy fragrence counter bimbo who’ll sleep with anyone, and a lisping Latino sidekick who turns out to be the criminal.  Not to mention the flasher who runs around for about five minutes flashing the audience with his less-than-appealing physique.  The humor reaches low and gets there.

But the film is actually more disturbing and unlikeable than it is funny or edgy.  It’s like Hill wants Rogan to be both likeable and unlikeable, and the sensibility that tries to pull this over while going for penis jokes, inappropriate behavior, and near psychopathic heroism, just bellyflops.

In some ways, I’m a bit surprised that a mall cop union didn’t try to boycott this film.  We get it.  Mall cops are people who would have been cops but they just couldn’t hack it.  They are loser wannabes.  Very incisive.

The fact that Rogan’s character hits his moments of greatest achievement in three scenes of violence is vaguely disturbing too.  He beats down a gang, nearly takes out a troop of police officers, and point-blank shoots the flasher in the chest with a big amount of blood.  The final incident is surprising and shocking, which I think is intended.  But then he’s praised as heroic rather than arrested for an outsized act of violence against the flashing perpetrator.  Hill is perhaps not sophisticated enough to be able to demonstrate an irony in this, but perhaps more frighteningly demonstrates the idealization of violence as a mode of strength, no matter the amount of delusion behind it.

It’s been many years since I’ve seen Taxi Driver, but that film reeked of the moral ambiguity and psychosis of the protagonist.  I’m not saying that you can’t have your complexities and laughs too, but the attempt here is highly off-putting and somewhat disturbing.