the Informer

Informer Staff Writer

When I heard that Seth Rogen was going to be in a movie about being a mall cop, I couldn't help but laugh. "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" had tried that already and failed but this movie actually looked good. Although I couldn't think of a movie about a mall cop without thinking of Kevin James tanking, I felt like it was worth giving it a try.,When I heard that Seth Rogen was going to be in a movie about being a mall cop, I couldn't help but laugh. "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" had tried that already and failed but this movie actually looked good. Although I couldn't think of a movie about a mall cop without thinking of Kevin James tanking, I felt like it was worth giving it a try.

With terrible memories of Kevin James' failed "Paul Blart" still fresh in my head, I took one halting step after another towards the movie theater. I got myself ready and went in, prepared for "Observe and Report" to wash away the horrible recollections.

What I ended up getting was mostly disappointing. I expected comedy, even though Seth Rogen had been seemingly trying for some slightly more serious as well as funny parts, I figured this would still be good for a laugh or two. What happened was the movie ended up being funny in parts but actually legitimately depressing in other parts. Writer and director Jody Hill's movie starts off with this guy, Ronnie (Seth Rogen), who works as a mall security guard. The movie starts out funny enough with Rogen acting like a simple yet highly competent chief of Mall Security that takes his job way too seriously. We see him at home with his mom who is drunk every night and passes out on the floor. Messed up families, hilarious! But this is about the time when the movie takes a nosedive and turns into one of the strangest movies I've seen. We see Rogen's character popping a pill when he gets a date with a hot coworker and his mom had referenced him being a child with several medical conditions, so an alarm bell goes off but we figure it can't be anything big. He ends up getting this girl wicked drunk and having sex with her while she is seemingly passed out on a vomit stained pillow. Kind of funny, but mostly just downright weird, since you think she might be dead until he stops in concern and she says, "know what, keep going."

From there we see him not taking his pills anymore, and he starts enjoying life a lot more. There are a few more funny scenes but we learn eventually (with giving away as little as I can) that he apparently was diagnosed with schizophrenia and had to take those pills in order to stay with reality. After he stopped taking the pills, everything got vaguely surreal. Most of the movie happened with him acting strangely, whether he was patrolling the mall as a civilian "undercover" and was prone to violent outbursts, he ended up staying in the mall after it closed and fighting/beating up roughly twenty police officers. It seems kind of funny, but when it is all put into the context of him having a drug problem it just got weird for me to enjoy it.

I am not going to give anything else away but you notice a drastic shift in the movie back to normalcy once he's back on his pills again at the end, although he still has some odd moments.

For some people it may seem like I was overanalyzing a stupid comedy movie, like reading too deeply into "Knocked Up" or something, but in the end the only thing that stood out to me was how strange the whole situation was.

The movie should have either been a straight out comedy (like I was expecting) or focused more on the character part of it and develop this schizophrenic mall cop thing into a movie that is more drama than comedy. "Observe and Report," tried to make a movie that, for some reason, was a halfway point between the two, and because of that it added to the fact that I was expecting hilarity. It all seemed slightly off for me.

Because of the fairly funny parts it does have, though, and because I think Seth Rogen did a decent job doing whatever he was doing (even though some of it was depressing rather than just funny) I will give this movie a 6.5. I have to admit, I was really disappointed.