Wow.

That was my only thought at the conclusion of “Observe and Report,” the new comedy by writer-director Jody Hill (“The Foot Fist Way”).  I couldn’t approve or disapprove.  I couldn’t be happy or sad.  Just “wow.” 

“Comedy” may be the wrong word for this movie.  It looks and behaves like a comedy.  It features funny actors like Seth Rogen, Anna Faris, and Patton Oswalt, and the rhythms of its dialogue and editing are familiar; you laugh as if by instinct.  Yet you can’t shake the feeling that the movie is something else in disguise—a trick.

Like Kevin James’ cuddly hit “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” “Observe and Report” is about a chubby, lonely mall cop who longs for the gun and badge of a “real” cop.  However, Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen) is much more fixated on the gun than roly-poly Paul.  When the police psychologist asks him why he wants to join the force, Ronnie recounts a dream where he saves a crowd of children by entering with a shotgun and “blowing shit away.”  Ronnie starts laughing happily; the mortified psychologist joins in nervously.  This scene plays something like the comedy of awkwardness in the recent “Role Models,” where the head of a mentoring program for kids rants about her former cocaine addiction with disturbing gusto.  Here, however, our hero is the awkward one, the one with no self-awareness, and he is intent on wielding a gun in the near future.

As you may have guessed, our hero is a just a little unbalanced.  He has bipolar disorder, which commands some sympathy.  And there is something charming about the way he vacillates between stiff politeness (addressing everyone as sir or ma’am) and outbursts of emphatic profanity.  Rogen’s performance is something like Adam Sandler’s in P.T. Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love”: half reinvention of a comedic persona and half portrait of crippling alienation.  “Punch-Drunk Love,” however, tries to make Adam Sandler the wacky man-child into a real human being—a man-child with hopes and dreams.  We already know Seth Rogen is a real human being: we see him as the laid-back, goofy pothead with a heart of gold from Apatown.  Here, however, his infectiously full-throated chuckle emerges at horrifically inappropriate times; his confused stare registers barely-repressed belligerence instead of endearing man-child uncertainty.

The movie would be dramatically richer with a more emotionally nuanced lead actor, but Hill seems totally uninterested in dramatic richness.  Occasionally, some possibility rears its head that Ronnie might be redeemable, a hope that he isn’t just a cartoon, frozen permanently in anti-social rage.  The relationship between Ronnie and his mother, in particular, threatens to be genuinely poignant.  Ronnie loves her steadfastly, even though she is a scatterbrained alcoholic incapable of rewarding his love.  After Ronnie’s biggest disappointment, Mom tries half-heartedly to console him.  “Well, Ronnie, you may not be that smart, but you have, uh, dreams, and, uh, dreams are, uh, important, and the world can’t…take that…away from you?”  The clichés of the self-esteem culture are inadequate to nurture Ronnie’s self-worth, and so he turns to a macho ethos that transforms his mundane existence into a cosmic battle of good and evil.  And, of course, he will be pitifully crushed when his delusion is revealed.

However, Ronnie proves uncrushable. His delusion is so absurdly overpowering that he actually finds the redemption he is seeking—a redemption that allows him to revert to his psychopathic norm. Like Paul Blart, Ronnie saves the mall (after a fashion) and gets the girl; he even gets the audience to cheer for him just a little before revealing that he is utterly unchanged.  That’s what makes this movie more truthful than “Punch-Drunk Love,” which tries to have it both ways with its psychopathic/innocent protagonist.  That’s also what makes “Observe and Report” something of a dead end.  It often seems more concerned with shocking us than with looking closely at its characters. Take Brandi, a pouting, whiny cosmetics clerk played with deadly precision by Anna Faris, Early on, we see her listening dead-eyed to a hip-hop sleaze track in her car as the bass pounds; “I’ll only show mine if he shows me his,” a female rapper purrs. Brandi stops in the mall parking lot and gets out of her car; a flasher approaches and exposes himself. Brandi screams and becomes hysterical for several scenes. It’s an effectively sickening moral statement that sums up the character a little too well: she doesn’t go anywhere from there.

The movie’s use of music is as profoundly disorienting as its use of human beings. It draws us into Ronnie’s world even as the absurdist comedy repels us. This is especially true of the climactic chase scene, where Ronnie finally finds his redemption. A cover of the Pixies’ “Where is My Mind” screams along as Ronnie moves in on his prey. When Ronnie finally delivered on his bloodlust, the audience I watched with gave its biggest laugh. Some clapped. Yes, Hill has brilliantly manipulated our sympathies and given us a powerfully conflicted experience, but the fact remains that his film inspires us, however briefly and confusingly, to cheer for the very embodiment of power-hungry, taser-wielding fascism. It even seems to subtly justify Ronnie’s derangement by placing him in a moral wasteland.

So what have we learned? Maybethat we can be forced to identify viscerally with what we want to condemn, and demonstrating that may hurt as much as it helps. Yet there is a kernel of thoughtfulness in two of the film’s characters—a police detective who hates Ronnie and a wholesome female cashier who likes him. These eminently reasonable people are on the periphery of this film’s twisted world, but their inability to deal effectively with Ronnie’s pathology—the detective’s inability to extinguish it and the cashier’s inability to recognize it—provide a revealing lesson in the ways that those who oppose evil can help it along. It’s not much, but it’s a start.