Bi-polar mall security guard Ronnie Barnhardt is called into action to stop a flasher from turning shopper's paradise into his personal peep show. But when Barnhardt can't bring the culprit ... Read allBi-polar mall security guard Ronnie Barnhardt is called into action to stop a flasher from turning shopper's paradise into his personal peep show. But when Barnhardt can't bring the culprit to justice, a surly police detective is recruited to close the case.Bi-polar mall security guard Ronnie Barnhardt is called into action to stop a flasher from turning shopper's paradise into his personal peep show. But when Barnhardt can't bring the culprit to justice, a surly police detective is recruited to close the case.
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- 1 win & 4 nominations total
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Featured reviews
great little dark comedy
I don't exactly like it, but I respect it...
And I can't say I exactly "enjoyed" myself, at least in the same way I did with previous Seth Rogen vehicles. This isn't Knocked Up or Zack and Miri Make a Porno where Rogen was this likable guy that the supposed schleps in the audience could identify with him in situations. Ronnie Bernhardt is the kind of guy who if he wasn't a screw-loose might almost be a kind of enthusiastic bad-ass. But as he is he is pushy, off-putting, obscene, at one point an arguable date raper, and is obsessed with using guns over his mace and tazer. He has a drunk mom, one of those almost conventional female things going on where he's "macking" on the ditsy cosmetics girl (Anna Faris) while the happy but tortured-for-her-broken-ankle girl working behind the bakery (Collette Wolf) that gets really bizarre, and a final thirty minutes that... I'll just leave it as it is here.
Suffice to say it's actually brave for Rogen to take on this character and not make us like him, at all, in the slightest. He may even have helped with some of the ad-libbing (one of the funniest scenes is between himself and a brown-skinned individual with a constant "F-you" back-and-forth where the pitch of their two-word insults get lower and lower), and if nothing else he is quite watchable in the role of Ronnie. What works against the movie is that it usually doesn't know what it exactly wants to be, and the director's ambitions get ahead of him. It's a comedy but at the least as dark as a black hole, and as a drama about a psychotic on the edge it gets too crude and obvious with white trash bits. It has a similar level of awkward tension fused with a sense of humor that is meant to illicit laughs from the protagonist's chutzpah and go-for-broke quality like Hill's The Foot Fist Way, maybe its only real link.
To be fair, I wasn't the biggest fan of that film, even as I can understand its appeal as a cult favorite. Maybe Observe and Report will get that too. I was astonished at times where the film went to with taking its character's exploits to a dangerous but somewhat logical conclusion. Other times I did indeed laugh a good deal, either from a moment of real randomness (I did like the joke on the twin Asian guards, "You're my infantry, if I lose one, God gives me another"). I can't say I exactly liked the movie a good deal, but I do respect it. It will split an audience as to what the hell it even is, or if it's as funny as it might be or if it follows its Taxi Driver roots to full-tilt. It's a true-blue curio, and I wouldn't either recommend it or tell you it's comedy poison.
Pure Great Dark Comedy.
Not as bad as people have written..........give it a chance
An Underappreciated Little Black Comedy
Did you know
- TriviaChris Evans had a panic attack while auditioning for the movie. He was brought back to audition a second time and had a second panic attack and still remembers the experience as one of his worst auditions.
- GoofsDuring the scene where Rogan is accusing the Indian mall worker of being the streaker as he massages lotion into a high school chick, you notice as they are going back and forth saying "f*** you" there is a woman pushing a stroller in the right background by the kiosk who disappears and reappears while they are cursing at each other.
- Quotes
Ronnie Barnhardt: I have a dream most nights. It starts on a playground. There's kids swinging, laughing, dogs barking, butterflies just flapping their little wings. And then you hear a rumbling, and over the horizon comes a black cloud and it's made of cancer and pus. And it starts sweeping over the playground and everyone starts screaming and clawing their eyes and pulling at their hair, and saying "Help! What do we do?" And you know what happens next? Out steps me wielding the biggest fucking shotgun you've ever seen in your whole life. And you know what I do? I blow every fucking thing away. And I am getting God's work done. When it's all over and the dust has settled, the whole world gathers below me and they say, "Thank you, Ronnie, thank you for helping, being a great man and doing this for us." And you know what I say? "You don't need to thank me. I'm just a guy with a gun. I'm just a cop."
Details
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- Country of origin
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- Language
- Also known as
- Đội Tuần Tra Mê Gái
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Box office
- Budget
- $18,000,000 (estimated)
- Gross US & Canada
- $24,007,324
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $11,017,334
- Apr 12, 2009
- Gross worldwide
- $26,973,554
- Runtime
- 1h 26m(86 min)
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 2.35 : 1






