‘Observe & Report’ Is Bitter & Ugly, Minus The Funny Counterbalance

The most effective way to acclimate you to the mood, spirit and tone being sought after with “Observe & Report,” is to bring up Terry Zwigoff’s “Bad Santa,” which did crass, coarse and ugly really well.

A perfectly framed and uproarious look at dirty and vile buffoons and the bad transgressions they make, ‘Santa’ was immensely enjoyable and well-executed black comedy.

Jody Hill’s clumsy “Observe & Report” however is profane, but bitter and mean-spirited on a all-too believable level. It’s also wildly incoherent, replete with disparate tones and gratuitous fbombs; it aims for the groin to hurt you, not to make you laugh at the inherent funniness of a cockpunch. It’s about as artless as a dumb, harmless comedy can be and looks like it was shot for $10 bucks which is probably why Warner Bros. decided it wasn’t worth the effort to object to the more offensive parts of the film.

Perhaps we thought this was obvious, but without a counterbalance in place, vulgar and nasty is just malicious and onscreen that’s only amplified like being under a white hot spotlight.

One shouldn’t be too surprised about Hill’s ‘Report,’ because much like his debut, “The Foot Fist Way,” he fails to recognize or care that films about nasty, ugly, irredeemable people need *some* redeeming characteristics if they hope to succeed as a whole. What ultimately surfaces is a mostly unpleasant, unclever and semi-noxious film with few genuine laughs. Instead, by throwing balance or medium to the wind, what’s delivered is yet another sloppy, inelegant and tossed together riff on a character (Rogen’s bi-polar freakshow) that feels tedious even at a scant 80 minutes (much like ‘Foot Fist Way,’ which would make for an excellent and hilarious 25-minute short, not a feature).

It’s also a very confused picture that’s erratic (and no, this isn’t trying to represent the bi-polarness). One moment it wants to be a comedy, and then it wants to be a borderline dramatic examination of a psychopath who’s generally unlikeable. Hill doesn’t seem to understand if and when psychoticness becomes too real, a scene that borders on date-rape ceases to be funny and this is the constant problem throughout — it doesn’t fully understand the nuances of comedy. In a recent interview Hill boasted how his fight scenes were incredibly realistic and sported authentic sounds of flesh being pounded and bones being broken which is fine if you’re trying to be Scorsese, but real violence isn’t particularly funny, it’s shocking and hard to watch and that amounts to much of ‘O&R’ (there’s a small token subplot with Collette Wolfe to make Rogen’s character mildly sympathetic, but it seems like an obligatory and disingenuous gesture).

There are undeniably funny moments: Michael Peña’s small role is amusing; Anna Faris’ drunken Britney Spears “shots!” spoof is hilarious (she’s near comedic gold), and Seth Rogen’s pathetic, drunken mom character is somehow given genuine empathy by actress Celia Weston who plays her both funny and sad. A fat, naked man running through the mall in slo-mo to a cover of The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind,” is unapologetically stupid while still outrageously amusing, but the film simply cannot survive off those comedic fumes (a lot of musical montages also seem extremely forced).

Thoughts that came from Twitter suggesting the film was one of the most outrageous a major studio has ever released are mostly on-the-mark, but just because you’re going balls out and for broke doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good or even remotely enjoyable. More thoughts later in the day or tomorrow.