(written by Terry MacNeil, on November 2, 2025)

The brilliant film Observe and Report (written and directed by Jody Hill) is among my favourite comedies – it is as consistently hilarious as it is appropriately mean-spirited. So I consider it a “vicious” comedy, because of the varied (often cartoonish) forms of cruelty that virtually every character in the film is forced to endure at some point(s).

The film is centred on a childish, rude, antisocial, nasty, and extremely dangerous/unstable bipolar security guard (aka “mall cop”). For simplicity’s sake, I shall refer to him as the “boss mall cop”. Well, only a TINY MINORITY of bipolar people are a menace to society – and the boss mall cop sure is. So for me, more movies (especially comedies) should have more protagonists as interesting/vicious as the boss mall cop. The boss mall cop has three main goals in his life:

1. Arrest a local flasher,
2. Become a “real cop”, and
3. Win the heart of the hot (AND uninterested AND clearly sociopathic) blonde female party animal he’s OBSESSED with.

Generally speaking, some of the most vicious movies I’ve ever seen – were movies that TRIED to make rape “funny” or “hilarious” in one way or another. And Observe and Report is one movie that is able to SUCCESSFULLY pull off that very difficult feat. In the film, the blonde female party animal grudgingly/reluctantly agrees to go to dinner with the boss mall cop – only because he’s so annoyingly persistent. At the restaurant, she gets incredibly drunk – after consuming A LOT of alcohol AND a lot of the boss mall cop’s prescription medication (specifically clonazepam, which is also the moment the boss mall cop hilariously decides he doesn’t need to take ANY medication EVER AGAIN). The boss mall cop then takes the barely conscious blonde female party animal back to her apartment – and they have sex. And many point out that this was a case of “date rape” – because she would’ve been too incapacitated to give informed consent. Even when she hilariously (and belatedly) consents to sex (while he is in the middle of fucking her), she STILL seems to be too incapacitated to fully consent. So I consider this a scene where we must condemn the actions of the boss mall cop – though he must also be condemned for an incredibly long list of hilariously violent acts throughout the film.

Observe And Report was made before the Me Too movement got going – back in the day when men (generally) were even more ignorant about sexual consent than they are today. The date rape scene in the film IS hilarious, though in the worst taste. But the entirety of this movie is unapologetically in bad taste – and that is why I love it so.

Should the mentally ill be offended by Observe and Report? Well, I’m not bipolar – but I’ll say this. This is a VERY silly film that is NOT meant to be taken seriously. You’d have to be pretty naive to think the boss mall cop is representative of common behaviour of people with bipolar disorder. Also, with a bit of tweaking to the character of the boss mall cop – he could’ve easily been a schizophrenic (a direction I wish Jody Hill had decided to go in). Oh well.

In closing, Observe and Report is a GREAT film – even if you’ve heard it isn’t. But I have better taste than the World’s “film critics”. So you should trust me, more than “them” – and as I type these words, Roger Ebert is spinning in his grave. Ⓐ