In the final act of Jody Hill’s misunderstood, dismissed, and combatively incisive Observe and Report, a tactical team of cops, equipped with guns, batons, and power, swarms an empty mall. There’s no active shooter and no larger threat of violence to which they’re responding, just a security guard the police have already declared to be pathetic, trespassing after hours in the place where he once worked. Seth Rogen’s Ronnie Barnhardt is braggadocious and self-involved, but — armed with only a flashlight — he’s harmless. That matters not at all to the unit responding to the Forest Ridge Mall, and neither does the fact that Ronnie is a “brother of the badge,” formerly dedicated to tackling crime and making his town safer. A half-dozen police chase, surround, and attack Ronnie, and even after he’s unconscious and helpless, they don’t stop kicking and punching. Nobody comes to his aid, and nobody cares.
With its many dick jokes, racist-minstrel-y accents from supporting characters, and prolonged “fuck you” exchange between Rogen’s character and Aziz Ansari’s, Observe and Report bears the non-PC qualities of late-aughts comedy. But it was never really a comedy. If you try to find a place for the 2009 movie in the contemporaneous humor spectrum between “Judd Apatow earnestness” and “Todd Phillips bro-ness,” you’re going to come up short. In both its presumed genre and in the larger era of Obamacore, Observe and Report was an anomaly: a prickly, somewhat hostile film wary of our police state and critical of our nationwide myth of meritocracy. Where so much of onscreen storytelling at the time was steeped in histrionic levels of sincerity and reverence for American institutions, Hill’s film had no interest in promoting the status quo or hiding whatever rottenness is present in this country’s criminal-justice system. (Needless to say, it’s a sentiment that resonates today.)
Observe and Report revolves around security guard Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen), a man who treats the shopping center where he works like his own fief and his non-security colleagues and mall shoppers like enemy combatants. When it premiered 15 years ago, it played like a grim portrait of the insidiousness of copaganda, the prevalence of Islamophobia post-9/11, and the self-delusion of American masculinity. And people did not care for that. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis opened her review with “If you thought Abu Ghraib was a laugh riot then you might love Observe and Report.” Others lambasted the movie’s date-rape scene between Rogen’s Ronnie and his long-time crush, Brandi, played by Anna Faris. It’s the film’s ugliest depiction of Ronnie’s self-assuredness, and the choice to include the scene in a red-band trailer was more than odd. Some implied Hill was pretentious for citing Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, and Taxi Driver as the film’s influences. (This was before we let Phillips get away with doing the same thing with Joker.) Observe and Report’s box office was a fraction of what the surprise megahit Paul Blart: Mall Cop had done a few months earlier. It was unavailable on streaming services for years. Hill didn’t make another feature film for nearly a decade, focusing instead on Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals, the TV series he worked on with recurring collaborators Danny McBride and David Gordon Green, until releasing 2018’s The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter through Netflix.
Observe and Report hit theaters 80 days after Obama’s first inauguration, which was in and of itself a salute to service. Before January 20, Obama spoke about Americans as “the heirs of that first band of patriots, ordinary men and women who refused to give up when it all seemed so improbable,” and Michelle Obama and Jill Biden hosted a pop concert for military members and their families and used the event to challenge children and teenagers to volunteer. The inauguration’s theme, “A New Birth of Freedom,” was pulled from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and meant to emphasize unity, camaraderie, and national identity. To serve was to be American, and to be American was to be of service. There wasn’t much room left for dissent, particularly from the less-inclined-to-blindly-celebrate-America left, and the same goes for the entertainment of the Obama years, the prevailing vibe of which often felt like “You will be hopeful or else.” Teamwork, a positive attitude, and inclusion were the party line, either genuinely (POC creators finally getting a chance taken on their ideas) or cynically (studios, networks, and streamers treating “representation” as not a moral decision but a financial decision). And pop culture that questioned that ideology, and how it ignored ongoing domestic economic hardship, social unrest, and empire-approved international violence, wasn’t exactly welcome.
Still, some Obamacore divergence persisted. The Ides of March starred George Clooney in “Do I look like I’m negotiating?” mode as a surprisingly corrupt Democrat running for president, while Matt Damon and John Krasinski embodied the small-town-destroying impact of oil-and-gas companies in Promised Land. Lupe Fiasco called Obama a “terrorist” for continuing U.S.-supported violence in the Middle East, then performed at an Obama inauguration party two years later and was escorted offstage after a rendition of “Words I Never Said” with lyrics including “These the same people supposedly telling us the truth/ Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist/ Gaza Strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit.” Sam Wallman’s cartoon about female drone pilots became an enduring meme after Zero Dark Thirty and a Daily Beast profile gave women in the military the girlboss treatment. And although Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly commercially flopped at the time, with a rare F CinemaScore from audiences, it has since become a cult classic for the contempt of its final speech, in which Brad Pitt’s hit man says of the myth of the American Dream and Obama as a defender of it, “This guy wants to tell me we’re living in a community. Don’t make me laugh. I’m living in America, and in America, you’re on your own. America’s not a country. It’s just a business. Now fucking pay me.”
These were outliers of opposition, and their criticism felt in line with their form — of course politically themed dramas would have political themes; of course a progressive rapper and a progressive cartoonist would poke at Obama’s progressive credentials. It was easy, then, for those who didn’t agree with this commentary to shrug it off because of how marginal it felt. But when an America-questioning analysis came in the form of a major wide-release comedy, backed by a major studio and starring Seth Rogen of the widely adored Knocked Up, Superbad, and Pineapple Express? Neither critics nor audiences really knew what to do with Observe and Report. The mall was our only communal space, guns were a valued Constitutional right, the “nice guy” still our only reliable romantic option — where so much of pop culture at the time twisted itself into defending these beliefs, Observe and Report prodded at how flattened our national identity had become because of them. All the movie’s lowbrow stuff (the full-frontal nudity, the drug use, the scene of Ronnie attacking kids with their own skateboards) is a reflection and an indictment of our morally vacuous time rather than a straight blessing of it, and whatever sympathy it has for Ronnie’s mental-illness struggles is balanced by a frustration with how easily he’s swayed into believing that a badge and a gun make him a hero.
Perhaps Observe and Report encouraged viewers to neglect it by asking too much of them; Hill assumed they would understand the film’s events are being projected through the brainwashed-into-American-exceptionalism Ronnie’s eyes. (To miss that, you’d have to miss how everything from Ronnie’s first slow-mo walk through the mall to his constant posing for the camera implies an awareness of being watched and a purposeful self-performance, but fine.) What’s impossible to misunderstand, though, and what places Observe and Report so fully and unapologetically outside of the storytelling mode of its time, is its comprehensive distrust of the police and how it positions them as a tribalist force that exerts dominance over citizens whenever they want and is then praised and lauded for it. Ronnie is, kindly, an idiot. But Ray Liotta’s Detective Harrison never once treats him as someone who deserves the kind of aid police are supposed to provide. We watch him berate and insult Ronnie, yelling into his face; brag to his colleagues about dropping off Ronnie at an infamous drug corner and essentially shrug off the suggestion that he might die; and order those cops to attack Ronnie en masse, then walk away from them as they continue to abuse his prone body. Hill tends to hold a beat slightly too long for effect, and that stylistic choice has the most impact whenever Observe and Report wants to emphasize how the police betray their mission and how rarely they suffer any consequences for that perfidy.
When promoting Observe and Report before its release, Hill was hesitant more than once about describing the film as a comedy, preferring to call it “a drama — that has jokes in it … There are parts of it where it’s sad, and it’s legitimately sad. It’s not funny sad, it’s just sad.” And although he described “arm wrestling matches” with Warner Brothers after it requested Ronnie be “more likable,” he praised it for its support of his film and other wild-swing movies like Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation: “Personally, just seeing a really long movie that just twists every stereotype of a superhero on its ass? I was really impressed that they took these chances.” Those quotes help contextualize the film’s ending. After Ronnie’s physical (and moral) beating by his town’s police force, he finally captures a flasher who has been terrorizing the mall’s female shoppers and employees and breaks the shopping center’s rules by both having a gun at the mall and shooting the man with it. With Rogen playing Ronnie straight-backed and triumphant, he drives the flasher to the police station, deposits him into Harrison’s custody, and accepts another officer’s praise for the capture. Later, in Observe and Report’s final scene, Ronnie has his job back, a girlfriend, and praise from the local news media. His use of excessive force got him everything he wanted and respect from the police, who wouldn’t accept him until he was baptized with blood. It’s a happy ending in-universe, a bleak one outside of it, and one last depiction of how Ronnie, and America at large, is codependently enamored with those who use violence to maintain hierarchies of power.
Ronnie never really observed and reported. But then the police, Observe and Report suggested, don’t exactly protect and serve. That message was too pessimistic a decade and a half ago, when stepping forward, stepping up, and trusting in the government felt essential to the promise of a better tomorrow — when everyone wanted to think that they too could be the heist-stopping, hostage-saving Paul Blart. Fifteen years later, that Segway’s run out of juice.