Observe and Report

Seth Rogan is a funny dude. But I felt that in Observe and Report, he just dared me to laugh. I mean, is it wrong that I just accept this movie as a send up of strange, wonderful, sad, funny, and scary America? Rogan's character, Ronnie, is so familiar to me that if I laugh at him too much, I feel I am just like Ray Liotta's Detective, at the short end of his very short patience, handing out crushing bad news just to make fun of Ronnie as he crumbles. No - I am even more like the detective/voyeur hiding in Liotta's closet gleefully anticipating Ronnie's reaction to the bad news. Upon exiting mid conversation and excusing himself to leave, the detective apologizes: "Sorry - I thought it would be funnier than this." I know the audience members caught themselves thinking the same thing.


That said, I enjoyed the film very much, and there are many funny moments. I like the relationship between Ronnie and his mother, I like his whole team, their flaws, their interests, and their friendships. I like Ronnie and his unwaivering, if insane determination. Every character is solid and unique. I laughed out loud at many careful details, like photos of the security guard twins pinned to the "suspect board" with "Dick color?" on a note beside them. And I love the outrageously drunk Brandi. And the Mall Manager's exhasperation. And the Danny McBride Crack Dealer! And Aziz Ansari's inspired "F-U" sequence as Sadaam!

But the movie also brought up some issues I've been pondering about how people think of themselves. I work on an airport where there exists a paintball business. Grown men bring their children out to learn to shoot each other. Granted it is all in good fun, and the paintballs hurt, but are not fatal. Like Ronnie, they aren't allowed to shoot each other with real guns, and they are pretend infantry, or guerillas, or whatever, just as Ronnie is a pretend cop.

They even have pretend wars that look like real ones. Once they hosted a Vietnam staging, complete with helicopter to drop off the infantry. I could never figure out why anyone would want to relive that, or if they really were. It felt so disrespectful to those veterans who had really experienced Vietnam for people to make a recreation out of it. A pretend real war game with pretend victims just didn't seem right. Just who were they trying to be?

Then one day, parked in our lot, was a protest car. Things, I thought, are now superbly absurd. Across the car's windshield was written "No War". I watched the people standing around the car, and concluded they clearly weren't with the paintball players. Or were they? Was this car protesting war, or protesting pretend war? Or was it a pretend protest? Everyone looked very serious, protesters and paintballers alike. Were they as confused about their roles as I was? I expect they were. But they were also living out some sort of weird contract that they would respect each other's choices in the roles they had taken on.

And here I come back to the beauty of Ronnie in Observe and Report. Despite everything, he does come to accept his role in the pretend-cop universe. Even better, he comes to understand it, and embrace it, as do the people around him. So as we voyeurs emerge from the movie theater where we spied on Ronnie in order to laugh at him, we realize that Ronnie really does know who he is. And because of that, I guess he wins!

Observe and Report is a De Line Pictures/Legendary Pictures production directed by Jody Hill.