Observe and Report is not a comedy. It doesn’t even try to be. Paul Blart: Mall Cop? That was a comedy. You could tell because the fat rent-a-cop was always falling down and crashing his Segway into shit. See? Comedy. Observe And Report is not a comedy.

Instead, it’s a surprisingly faithful reworking of nothing less than Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, staged in a placid shopping plaza instead of a festering Manhattan. 

Jody Hill, creator of the cult comedy The Foot Fist Way and the cable series Eastbound & Down, continues to indulge his obsession with deeply broken characters. Hill finds new, creepy resonance in Seth Rogen’s blank-eyed, shambling persona, casting him as an unstable mall security officer who’s just a few missed meds away from going totally Travis Bickle on the irritants and annoyances of his beloved Forest Ridge Mall.

Rogen’s gung-ho Ronnie Barnhardt is one of those puffed-up dolts who takes his modest responsibilities way too seriously. He’s fixated on a comely makeover girl (Anna Faris, once again knowing no fear) and obsessed with capturing the pervert who’s been flashing shoppers in the parking lot. When an actual police detective (Ray Liotta) shows up to take over the investigation, you can hear Ronnie start ticking just a little louder.

Given Rogen’s body of work, Observe And Report is bound to strike some people as funny – it certainly got its fair share of laughs at a preview screening last week – but it only plays as a comedy if you’re willing to block out the unpleasant subtext in every single scene. The glimpses of Ronnie’s home life with his alcoholic mom (Celia Weston) play like some nightmarish live-action version of Nelson Muntz’s life on The Simpsons.

Like The Foot Fist Way, Observe And Report is a ragged, spastic and often ugly film. Hill just doesn’t care about glossing up the lives of his subjects; in fact, he’s most interested in capturing them at their lowest and most pathetic. And you don’t get much more pathetic than Ronnie Barnhardt. There’s a weird integrity to that, somehow.

normw@nowtoronto.com