Observe and Report is an eighty-six minute comedy starring Seth Rogen as Ronnie, a mall cop with ambitions to become a cop and a huge crush on the woman working at the makeup counter, but when actual crimes start happening at the mall, and he has to face how far the image of himself is from the reality, he realizes that his dreams may not come true.

Casting Seth Rogen in Observe and Report makes sense because clearly the filmmakers saw Ronnie as a loveable loser who deserves to be part of a community, get a girl and be the hero that he envisioned himself to be. He is supposed to be a type of relatable every man who may not have his dreams come true, but has the epiphany that the life that he has is pretty good if he worked a little harder, appreciated the people that were already in his life and stopped striving for goals or to have people in his life that are actually toxic. Unfortunately the distance between how the filmmakers envision Ronnie compared and contrasted to the pile of characteristics that represent Ronnie is a wide chasm that is a little to alarming to get the audiences to see the man that they want us to root for.

Ronnie is disproportionately violent to whatever action is called for in the scene, and it absolutely makes any light-hearted humor screech to a tone changing halt when the consequences of his violence are realistic. To once again borrow a line from Christy Lemire’s review for The Spy Who Dumped Me, which I disagreed with in that context, but absolutely applies in Observe and Report, “It’s the extreme violence, which serves as a jarring contrast to the goofy antics.” It is really hard to sustain a comedic atmosphere if your main character has the potential to kill anyone or get killed. Violence can be funny, but not if no one in the film recognizes the harm that violence can cause and reacts to it appropriately otherwise everyone is simply a clueless monster, and they are living in a nightmarish, dystopian world.

It is really hard to find Observe and Report amusing when you already live in a world of delusional vigilantes who hurt innocent people. Ronnie is the kind of hero that bears more of a resemblance to a less politically motivated or racist version of George Zimmerman or Kyle Rittenhouse instead of a goofy person who really enjoys comic books. This movie predates the emergence of the real life vigilante that we have become more familiar with so it is hard to root for Ronnie as the intended underdog that we are supposed to empathize with.

Observe and Report also came out at a time when making fun of people’s struggles with mental illness was easier to do without expecting the average viewer consider the implications of a diagnosis and the effect of choosing to take medication or not. Ronnie takes medication for a mental illness, which makes him ineligible to become a cop. He stops taking his medicine, and other people see his medicine as a source of recreational fun. Am I saying that these topics are forbidden to mine humor? Absolutely not, but the filmmakers see the fact of taking medication and having a mental illness as a sufficient punchline, not the story leading up to the punchline. It is lazy and not funny because it is two-dimensional. Also because Ronnie is violent and mentally ill, the movie is playing off of dangerous tropes by practically conflating the two as if they are always associated with the other, which puts people with mental illness in danger of institutional violence. Is this the only movie that does it? No, but at least when you watch a horror, thriller or drama that trucks in such inflammatory pairings, presumably a viewer is at least entertained.

Observe and Report is not a sustainably funny film. When the movie is briefly funny, it is when it delves into the personal dynamics of mall life. As an anthropological, over the top approach, it could have been wet your pants hilarious. Any scene involving whispering is brilliant—between Ronnie and his coworker, whom Michael Pena plays (thank God that Pena has bills because he is generally better than the crap movies that he stars in) and during the profane laced insults hurled between Ronnie and Aziz Ansari’s character who is a sexually harassy dude running a stand in the mall. Even though the Anna Farris scenes are highly promoted, were considered the most controversially and were occasionally brilliantly funny, the scenes with Collette Wolfe are unexpectedly sweeter and amusing than I would expect considering how broken her character, Nell, has to be to find Ronnie appealing. It felt as if the filmmakers and promoters do not understand what is actually LOL worthy.

Congratulations to Ray Liotta, who gives the same performance that any movie lover would expect him to give if he was in a drama, not Observe and Report. He is amusing because if a cop did have to deal with someone like Ronnie and actually was trying to solve a crime, he would hate Ronnie as much as Liotta’s character did. His initial restraint was admirable, and while I am definitely urging people not to slam annoying people in the face with one of those poles with a sign, I would be lying if I claimed that it was one of the few violent scenes that I did not slightly giggle. When I begin siding with police brutality and excessive force, something has gone completely wrong.