Observe and Report Just Plain Nasty

Critics have observed, and they’re reporting that the latest mall-cop movie is brutal and sadistic with little cause: Seth Rogen's character is no Paul Blart.

• "If you thought Abu Ghraib was a laugh riot then you might love Observe and Report," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Sadism is this movie’s currency,” she says of the “dumber-and-dumbest yukfest.”

• Observe and Report treats nastiness as if it’s “some new form of hip,” but “it doesn’t work: the jokes are just sour,” writes David Denby in the New Yorker. Viewers are “treated in much the same way as the flasher’s victims.”
• Filled with “head-bashing,” “stomach-kicking,” and “nightstick-beating,” the film “heaps piles of bad, crazy stuff at our feet then walks away,” Betsy Sharkey writes in the Los Angeles Times. “There is no moral to this story, and there's not much comedy either.”

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