Observe and Report

"Wow that was dark," I thought to myself, bracing myself against my car in the parking lot of the Tyngsboro AMC on Saturday morning.

It's not often that I have to stand in the fresh air and clear my mind after seeing a movie. But this was one of those times.

Like many people, my reaction upon having seen the trailer to Observe and Report a couple months ago was what...the...hell? Did we just have a movie about a mall security guard who lives with his mother, dreams of being a police officer, drives to work in a strange vehicle, falls in love with an attractive blonde salesgirl, has an awkward alcohol-related encounter with her, and then attempts to impress her with his manly deeds in thwarting crime at the mall?

The phenomenon of closely-related pairs of movies coming out at the same time is actually well established (see here for an entertaining review of recent examples).

But who would have thought: two mall-cop movies?

But if you were worried that Observe and Report wasn't differentiated enough from Paul Blart: Mall Cop, you can relax. Despite surface similarities, they are quite different in tone, and take the story in very different directions by the end of the film.

The contrast between the two films is actually most readily seen in the two movies' love interests, the blonde damsels in distress. In Blart, the object of the hero's affection and attention, Amy (Jayman Mays) is rather sweet and charming, and receptive to Blart's awkward advances. We as the audience are meant to endorse the relationship, and we are on Blart's side as he strives to overcome his proto-boyhood stage to win her by honor and sacrifice.

In Observe and Report, the love interest of the (anti)hero (Ronnie, played by Seth Rogen) is Brandi, played by Anna Faris, who gets to play down to the bimbo stereotype that has been building around her in recent roles. Unlike Blart's Amy, Ronnie's Brandi is an unredeemed and narcissistic tramp. There is no where for the Ronnie-Brandi relationship to go but down, way down.

A similar comparison exists between the mother characters in the two movies. Blart's mother is supportive. Ronnie's mother is a drunk, in falling down way.

And that's where the story goes---down. Whereas Blart takes the hero on a victorious journey of honor, Observe and Report takes the protoganist on a journey of pain caused by his own delusions of grandeur.

The centerpiece of Ronnie's delusion is that he misses out completely on the woman who should be his true love interest, the hapless and tormented Nell (Collette Wolfe), who patiently endures Ronnie's noninterest in her, even as she shines forth to the audience as the woman he should be with. No analogous character exists in Blart, of course, because in narrative terms, Blart is on the correct path.

The "point-of-sanity" in Observe and Report is Detective Harrison, played by Ray Liotta. Whenever he is on the screen, it is like a breath of fresh air, a break in the clouds of the madness of everything else that is going on. But even has a slightly sadistic streak, one that almost gets Ronnie killed.

In my write-up of Blart, I said that is full of "lumpen" but lovable characters, and seemed to be a hopeful view of an America trying to emerge from the strata of crap that has been laid upon it for decades. Observe and Report, by comparison, looks at the same tableau and sees a suicide mission, one that can have a happy ending only after the endurance of extreme agony and humiliation (as well as the mind-numbing full frontal obese male nudity).

Which view is more accurate? We're going to find out in the coming months and years.