As I watched Observe and Report, I hated it. I mean really, really hated it. Yet kept watching it. And I'm glad I did, because maybe for the first time in my viewing lifetime a movie not only turned it around in the last five minutes, but actually showed me that everything I had been thinking was wrong about the film was actually right.
I've also never been a big Seth Rogan fan. While I loved him in The 40 Year Old Virgin, I usually find him obnoxious. Especially in lead roles. (There is only so much Rogan one can take, after all.) The exception to this rule is the hit Superbad. I love the first half with all the Jonah Hill/Michael Cera stuff, but the Seth Rogan/Bill Hader/Christopher Mintz-Plasse subplot is almost unendurable.
And I didn't like him in Observe and Report, either. His character, Ronnie, a mall cop with dreams of glory, is arrogant, obnoxious, dangerous, and downright mean. Unpleasant as hell. And yet, as I discovered, that's the whole point.
Observe and Report was not well received--it scored a poor 51% on Rotten Tomatoes and took in a weak 26 million at the box office--but of all the insults hurled at it, perhaps the worst were the inevitable comparisons to the vastly more successful Mall Cop. The two movies have literally nothing in common except they both revolve around a mall and a cop, yet reviewers insist on comparing the two. Mall Cop is lame but harmless. It may be one of the lamest movies ever made. Observe and Report is not lame. Alienating, disturbing, frightening and maddening yes, but not lame.
In an interview with AV club, Hill speaks to his penchant for darker, edgier characters, and Observe and Report takes that predilection about as far as any Hollywood film since Taxi Driver. Though, in all honesty, it goes further than Taxi Driver in that for all his porn and gun-obsessed behaviour, Travis Bickle remains oddly sympathetic. Seth Rogan's Ronnie is not sympathetic at all. Nor does he change or grow.
And this is where the film utterly subverts the Hollywood norm and where I finally realized I was watching a work of genius.
A few obvious examples: In The Road Warrior, Max goes from being a cynical loner to a selfless hero. In one of my favorite Cronenberg films, The Fly, Seth Brundle begins as a goofy but harmless genius, transforms into a murderous insect-monster, then ends the film as a pathetic, suffering victim of an experiment gone wrong as he begs for the peace of death.
Now that's pole to pole.
Observe and Report is having none of that. One reason (without giving too much away) that I found the film frustrating was that I kept looking for the signs and clues that Seth Rogan's take-no-prisoners Ronnie was going to start to change his ways, stop being an out-of-control dick, and become the warm and fuzzy loveable mensch that we have been trained to expect he's going to transform into by film's end.
What's amazing about the film, and what knocked me off the couch is that Rogan's Ronnie barely budges. Sure, the movie flirts with his transformation, it almost happens toward the end, but then a shocking event puts Ronnie right back to where he started, accompanied by the most sarcastic "slow clap" in cinema history. Yes, he does experience a sort of epiphany where he learns to love who he is, but he doesn't change.
He doesn't compromise to fit in. Instead, he forces society to change in order to accept him and even idolize him. In society's eyes he goes from a loser to a hero, but internally, he doesn't change one iota. I honestly can't say I've ever witnessed a more brilliant subversion of storytelling norms in a Hollywood movie.
In one crucial scene, Rogan (who wants to be a cop) is tricked by a local detective (played by Ray Liotta) to go on foot patrol in the worst part of town. Ronnie gets in a scrap with evil drug dealers (head of the gang played by Danny McBride) who get the drop on him and are about to execute him.
Which begs the question, how did a movie this pitch-back get made?
Apparently, Seth Rogan has a lot to do with it, fighting for the filmmaker to keep the darker, edgier scenes in the film despite the studio's cold feet.
So while I still hate Seth Rogan in Superbad, I have to say, if he fought for Observe and Report, then he has to be a decent guy. A mensch you might even say. Good enough for me.