For fans of Jody Hill, the success ofThe Righteous Gemstoneson HBO is no surprise.TheRighteous Gemstonesis the third series Hill co-created for the network, the first beingEastbound& Down,followed byVice Principals. While his collaborations with Danny McBride have resulted in his most well-known work (not counting the duo’s 2006 no-budget martial arts comedy,The Foot Fist Way), Hill also directed and wrote a film that was released the same year his first HBO series premiered.
Despite starringSeth Rogenat the height of his career, the film was a commercial and critical failure. Coming right on the heels of 2008’sPineapple Express(and a few years before2012’s bizarreGreen Hornetcrashed and burned), it’s hard to imagine anything with Rogen failing in 2009, but that’s exactly whatObserve and Reportdid on every level.
Despite being widely forgotten due to its initially poor reception and low viewership,Observe andReporthas builta small but dedicated fan base since its release. While by no means a perfect film, a lot of what makes Jody Hill’s later work so compelling is present in the 2009 movie. Hill would receive the recognition he deserves with his later projects, butObserveand Reportshould still be remembered as a dark comedy that was ahead of its time.
Pitch Black Satire
To say thatObserve & Reportis dark is a bit of an understatement. The film is about a bipolar mall cop, Ronnie Barnhardt, who will stop at nothing to catch a serial flasher. Along the way, Ronnie attempts to seduce Brandi, a make-up counter worker played byAnna Faris, and spars with an actual policeman, Detective Harrison, played by Ray Liotta. The inclusion of Liotta, most famous for his starring role in Martin Scorsese’sGoodfellas, makes a lot of sense as two of the film’s biggest influences are the Scorcese filmsTaxi DriverandThe King of Comedy,according to an AV Club interview with Jody Hill.
The Scorsese comparison is apt; Ronnie has a lot in common withcharacters like Jake LaMotta and Travis Bickle. Like LaMotta and Bickle, Ronnie models his life around an outdated and ultimately self-destructive form of masculinity. He thinks of himself as the thin blue line that keeps the mall from falling into chaos when he’sjust a racist, sexist incel. In 2022, it’s not hard to see parallels between this and our current moment. The audience isn’t supposed to relate to Ronnie. They’re supposed to pity him at best and hate him at worst.
Great Seth-Pectations
By 2009, Seth Rogen had already been typecast as a sympathetic schlub due to movies likeKnocked UpandPineapple Express. His characters were often lazy man-children, but they werelikablelazy man-children. The expectation going into a Seth Rogen movie was that you would enjoy watching him and find his struggles relatable. This is in stark contrast toObserve and Report.
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Ronnie Barnhardt is an unpleasant person to observe for the length of an entire movie. He is a narcissistic bigot who does not become a better person by the end of the film. He arguably only gets worse, and yet he gets a happy ending. Audiences went intoObserve and Reportthinking that they would get one thing based on its star, but they instead got something much more twisted. This bait-and-switch hurt the film critically and at the box office, but it wouldn’t work without it.
You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat it Too
For all of its hilarious moments and trenchant satire pointed at bigotry and toxic masculinity,Observe and Reportoften falls into the same traps it criticizes. Plenty of jokes in the film are at the expense of marginalized communities. While these could be viewed as an extension of the cultural critique, many come across as just bigoted. These are jokes the movie is making, not bad jokes the characters are telling.
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There are also moments where the film gets too dark for its own good. The most infamous example is the date scene. Ronnie eventually coerces Anna Faris’s Brandi into going on a date, ending with Ronnie taking advantage of an incredibly intoxicated Brandi. She is clearly in no state to be offering consent. This, along with some other unsavory moments, make the film hard to recommend without some caveats.
Observe & Reporthas its issues (which thankfully aren’t present in Jody Hill’s currently running show,The Righteous Gemstones), but it should be celebrated for what it did right. The film was unlike anything else coming out at that time from a major studio. Audiences at the time couldn’t grasp why Seth Rogen, lovable stoner, was playing such an abhorrent character. Now, with hindsight and the context of Hill’s later work, it’s much easier to see what the film was trying to say about American culture and masculinity.
While it’s impressive that Hill managed to sneak something so darkly satirical into what seemed like a normal studio comedy, subverting the audience’s expectations so drastically also doomed the film to obscurity. It’s high time that the film is brought back into the public consciousness and reevaluated, if for no other reason than it’s the only film in existence to include the criminally underrated McLusky on the soundtrack.
