There has been a certain distinct tendency towards "cringe humor" in a lot of recent films - comedy based in making the viewer feel as uncomfortable as possible, usually through humiliating the characters or presenting them as cluelessly offensive - but the style has hit something like an apex in Observe and Report, the second feature film written and directed by Jody Hill, a member of the better-known David Gordon Green's sphere of influence. In this movie, Hill presents us with a mall security officer named Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen), who may very well be the most appalling and wicked comedy protagonist ever.

Admittedly, ever is a long time, and if I spent some time thinking about it, I could probably come up with at least a handful of characters over the years who are just as purely awful as Ronnie. But worse? Probably not - my imagination isn't up to the task of inventing a leading character who's worse. Any more devastating personality flaws, and the film would cross handily over the line from "I'm laughing because I'm so damn uncomfortable and I need a release" to "I am not laughing, because this is unspeakably nasty shit". Indeed, for a great many viewers and critics, Observe and Report skips right over that line without looking back, and I have no interest in trying to convince those people that they're wrong. Because facts are facts, and the fact is that Observe does not particularly care about being liked, and it's surely not to all tastes. I don't know if I'd quite argue that it's a "challenging" film - that word implies a great many things, and only a couple of them are appropriate here - but God knows it's a hard film to enjoy.

Backing up a bit: Ronnie is the head of security at a mall in some unidentified city, though it is plainly not especially large (the film was shot in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the surrounding towns). He's an emotional wreck: we learn that he suffers from bipolar disorder, and there's an implication that he might have plenty of other problems that are never enumerated (his father abandoned the family during Ronnie's infancy due to the boy's many special needs). The net result of whatever horrid things lie in Ronnie's past is that he harbors a dream of becoming a policeman, so that he'll be seen as a hero by all the people he saves and - probably more importantly - because he really wants the power that comes from the gun. But in the meantime, he's stuck as a mall cop, and with his desire for authority and adulation limited to the confines of a shopping center, he's something of a tyrant, treating the mall as his personal fiefdom, where he can verbally abuse anyone he chooses to suspect of misdeeds. At the same time, he knows that he has never achieved anything of great worth, and he longs to do this, mostly to impress the one woman in the building who he loves above all things in the world, the make-up counter worker Brandi (Anna Faris). When a flasher starts to haunt the mall's parking lot, Ronnie concludes that this is his great opportunity to prove himself a hero, though his ideas of how to apprehend the pervert quickly take on uncommonly violent overtones.

Plenty of people have already compared the film to Taxi Driver, and there seems to be no reason not to add to the pile; Hill's film is similar enough to Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader that it would be hard to believe that it wasn't his intent from the outset. Both are about essentially anonymous men who rebel against their anonymity by fetishising violence; in both cases, the man is inspired by a woman who has no particular inclination to return his lust; both get a lot of mileage by forcing us into the POV of a man who is, if not precisely a sociopath, certainly on the road to becoming a sociopath. The key difference is that Taxi Driver is an utterly mirthless drama about the hell of city life, whereas Observe and Report is a comedy, starring the man who has turned into the contemporary torchbearer for good-natured quip-fests about the silly ways that dudes stumble through life.

That is not an easy fit, but it works. The great majority of Rogen's prominent roles in things like Knocked Up, Superbad and Pineapple Express are cuddly men who do things that are sometimes foolish and destructive, but it's all waved away because he didn't mean it, and y'know, guys are guys, 'm I right? Ronnie isn't so very far away from those characters, but he's a twisted version of them, and Observe and Report turns into a fairly savage critique of the whole "bro" cultural thing: he isn't just "a guy, y'know", he's a raging asshole who commits terrible acts, from harassing a Middle-Eastern shopkeeper just on principle to date-raping the girl of his dreams - it's a fantastic opportunity for Rogen to show that he can do more than just one thing, and by playing an irredeemable prick exactly how the role is written, he gives what's certainly the bravest and maybe the best performance of his career. The one thing that keeps the film from tipping into outright vileness is its focus on how Ronnie misunderstands the gulf between his actions and the mythic heroism that he ascribes to himself. He's ultimately not a villain, but a buffoon, and while the film he resides in turns out to be one of the meanest and most unapologetically misanthropic comedies I can think of, it's never a sour thing to watch, mostly because Ronnie is generally construed within the film as a pathetic being rather than a dangerous one.

I mean this in a relative sense: Hill still doesn't cut us very much slack. Everything in the film looks decayed, doubly so when seen through the lens of Tim Orr's camera (Orr, a brilliant cinematographer who deserves much more attention than he has ever received, has a particular genius for capturing the weary feeling that you get when you're standing in a run-down or well-worn place), and the images are always just a bit too tight and claustrophobic; and in those few cases where Ronnie manages to act on his violent impulses, Hill never misses a chance to really drive home the resultant destruction in quick, aggressive close-ups. There's no way out of the film, really: it looks mean and it is mean, and though it's generally quite funny, it's not the least bit fun. Though I'm pleased to have seen it, and I suspect I'll remember the film for a good while longer than some apparently-superior movies that are easier to process, I can't quite bring myself to actually recommend it to anybody.

7/10