"Observe and Report" has been described -- not inaccurately -- as a combination of "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" and Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver." The bipolar rent-a-cop played here by Seth Rogen also recalls another demented Scorsese malcontent, Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), the would-be stand-up comic who lived with his unseen (or imagined?) mother in "The King of Comedy."

Peter Sorel/Warner Bros. Pictures

Dennis (Michael Peña, left) and Ronnie (Seth Rogen) ogle the girls in the dark comedy "Observe and Report."

Observe and Report

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Rated R for pervasive language, graphic nudity, drug use, sexual content and violence

Length: 106 minutes

Released: April 10, 2009 Nationwide

Score: 3.0

Cast: Seth Rogen, Anna Faris, Michael Peña, Ray Liotta, Collette Wolfe

Director: Jody Hill
Producer: Donald De Line
Writer: Jody Hill
Genre: Comedy
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures

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But if writer-director Jody Hill's second feature reveals the telegony of movies past, it's also very much -- and this may be the most disturbing thing about it -- a child of its time. It's a comedy with a foot on the neck of the Zeitgeist, and it's this pressure on the trachea that crushes the laughter in our throats.

As timely in its own dark if coincidental way as the release of a Christmas movie in December, "Observe and Report" arrives at the end of a month's span when an astonishing 47 people have been killed in America in mass shootings and their aftermaths. Trailing the placenta of his emergence from the trauma of our 24-hour news cycle comes Rogen as Ronnie Barnhardt, head of security at a generic suburban mall -- an environment compared to the bloody field of the Colosseum in ancient Rome in The Band's performance of Bob Dylan's "When I Paint My Masterpiece," which is heard over an opening-credits montage of unexcited shoppers.

Quick with his Taser and quicker with his F-bombs, Ronnie is the type of frustrated, racist, gun-obsessed "angry white male" that sociologists warn us about. This is Barney Fife as re-imagined by Jim Thompson. However, because he's played by the typically affable Rogen, the cuddly-physiqued stoner star of "Knocked Up," he's also -- initially, at least -- presented as somewhat lovable, even with an institutional Curly Howard crewcut that gives him the appearance of a menacing baby and a brow as knitted with confusion as Lon Chaney Jr.'s in the throes of lycanthropy.

Leader of a "special elite task force" that includes a pair of dumpy Asian twins (John and Matt Yuen) and a lisping Hispanic officer (Michael Peña), Ronnie ignores the muted flirtations of the "born-again virgin" (Collette Wolfe) who works at the cookie shop in favor of fantasizing over a beautiful but crass cosmetics clerk named Brandi (the always brilliant Anna Faris). When a parking-lot flasher traumatizes this promiscuous party girl, Ronnie tries to prove his worth by capturing the pervert -- a pursuit that creates conflict with an actual police detective, played by Ray Liotta. (With Liotta in the lead, it would have been easy to rework this film into a straight psycho-thriller.) Soon, the collision between vainglorious delusion and hostile reality send Ronnie into a surreal, Hubert Selby-like spiral of dangerous behavior ("Requiem for a Dream," indeed).

Hill's first feature film was the low-budget comedy "The Foot Fist Way," a similarly disturbing character study that became a word-of-mouth cult fetish object when it was championed by such celebrity fans as Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow. "Observe and Report" is similarly uneven, but more ambitious and undeniably the product of Hill's distinct sensibility.

Whether he's in control of his material or confused himself about his message, Hill doesn't make things easy for the audience; we're unsure how to respond to the jokes, the aggressiveness and the "heroics." (One could say the same about Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" and Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs.") This is why the film's assaultive profanity, surprising violence and OMG nudity are so unsettling, where such things just seem vulgar in, for example, "Step Brothers." (The nakedness, incidentally, is all male -- after "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and "Watchmen," this truly is the year when an R rating for nudity doesn't mean what it used to.)