There needs to be a category for movies that aren’t very good, but are worth seeing anyway, at least for people who care about film and filmmaking.  I’ve passed on “Observe and Report” for months now because it wasn’t reviewed very well, and the previews made it look like typical Seth Rogen/Judd Apatow goofy comedy material.   I was expecting Paul Blart 2 and I hadn’t bothered to see Paul Blart.

But “Observe and Report” is more “Taxi Driver” than “Mall Cop.”   It’s funny at times, but never goofy; it goes for laughs in a dark and intense way.   Writer/Director Jody Hill enjoys daring you to like his main character, and then abruptly daring you to hate him, and then cycling through again.   Played by Seth Rogen, he is a mall cop who sees himself as the only thing keeping the forces of evil from overwhelming the good shoppers of suburbia.   Seriously – no, I really mean it – seriously.  He believes it with such passion and intensity, without ever winking at the camera, that it’s funny, but it’s also scary.   Most comedy characters are, when it comes right down to it, about maladjusted inviduals, but most comedy movies just don’t go there.   “Observe and Report” goes there.   In spades.

Rogen gets his big chance when a flasher starts haunting the mall; he hunts the guy with ferocious intensity, and their showdown ends in one of the most surprising, and possibly disturbing, scenes I’ve seen in a movie for a while.  And that moment captures the strange unevenness of “Observe and Report:”  one moment it’s madcap, naked fat guy comedy, then suddenly – bam.   It’s something else altogether.

It fails, though, because while Hill loves to make us uneasy,  there never seems to be a point behind the uneasiness.  Travis Bickel is a psychopath who becomes a hero in the end because he murders a pimp instead of a politician, and that says something about society and community and heroism.   In contrast, Seth Rogen plays a psychopath who becomes a hero.   End of story.