As soon as I learned that Scott "Mr. Unwatchables" Von Doviak had gone out of his way to avoid seeing the writer-director Jody Hill's new comedy Observe and Report, I knew that I would move hell and high water of necessary to get an early gawk at it. I can't chalk this up entirely to morbid curiosity. I enjoyed Hill's first film, The Foot Fist Way, a raggedly low-budget indie comedy starring Danny McBride as a malfunctioning martial arts instructor, and I loved Eastbound & Down, a six-episode HBO series that Hill co-created with Ben Best and McBride, who played a broken-down wreck of a burnt out professional baseball player. Observe and Report stars Seth Rogen as Ronnie Barnhardt, a shopping mall rent-a-cop who could be Paul Blart's evil twin. An overgrown pudgy ball of unfocused adolescent rage, Ronnie sees his chance for redemption in the quest to apprehend a flasher who's been bothering people in the parking lot; the movie, which tends to wear its conceptual ideas on its sleeve, makes it clear that the flasher is Ronnie's doppelganger, but instead of harassing people with his unclothed swinging dick, Ronnie has mace and a baton and is trying to find a way against the mall's prohibition against loaded firearms. This is Hill's entry into big-budget, major studio feature filmmaking, and he's clearly set on maintaining his signature edge: a satirical approach towards blustery, lower-class macho bullies and the corrupted cultural images of masculine heroism from which they take their cues, that flirts dangerously with condescension. Bringing that sort of thing off in the context of a big commercial comedy that has to make it past the preview audience test groups would be some trick, especially since Hill's direction tends to be pretty rudimentary beyond his way with actors and his ability to set up a joke. Observe and Report also suggests that it might be some trick pulling it off without Danny McBride in the lead.

Hill's protagonists are such jerks, long on delusional self-assurance and short of self-knowledge, that they seem unendurable right up to the point where they finally betray their fear and vulnerability, which makes them harder to shake off. (Will Ferrell gave Hill and company a leg up in the business by lending his name, as "presenter", to The Foot Fist Way and his presence to half the episodes of Eastbound & Down, and he may be attracted to Hill's work because he sees these characters as the evil twins of the easily hurt boy-child characters he often plays.) The final episode of Eastbound & Down ends with a variation on the end of Five Easy Pieces, except that when McBride's failed ball player drives off and leaves his girlfriend in the lurch, it's because he can't bear to tell her to his face that the spectacular future he's promised her--in exchange for her agreeing to upend her whole life for him--isn't going to happen. In moments like that, McBride's ability to suddenly seem incredibly charismatic and touching while still looking much like the guy having an impotent fit while standing in line behind you at the DMV really shines. Rogen's work here is game and deeply felt, but there are moments in the movie--especially in a bedroom scene with Anna Faris and the movie's ending-- where Hill tries to take the comedy to some next level of potentially jaw-dropping shock laughter, and every time one of them arrives, Rogen's performance hits a speed bump. Without a Danny McBride to finesse the really daring gags and tonal shifts, these scenes play as if the moviemakers were in denial about what they were doing.

They do know what they're doing, in theory: Hill has protected himself against charges of being a Neanderthal by telling interviewers that his taking-off point is Taxi Driver. (He's also protected himself by a shrewd strategic gambit: although the angry white male Ronnie is implicitly racist in his attitudes, he has a Latino second-in-command, played by Michael Pena, who he regards as a friend, and although he's been given incompetent Asian underlings to mock and an Arab-looking nemesis (played by Aziz Ansari, of the Human Giant troupe) who he addresses as "Saddam", the movie has been all but scrubbed clean of black people, the better to avoid the question of how Ronnie might feel about them. And when Ronnie is dropped off in a "bad neighborhood" to be threatened by crack dealers, damned if their leader isn't white. As a matter of fact, he's Danny McBride.) Some of the actors know what they're doing, too. As the cosmetics-counter blonde who Ronnie zeroes in on as his dream girl, Faris does her picture-saving thing, giving a gleefully malicious cariacture of a yowling, unfeeling bitch whose monstrousness can't be attributed to Ronnie's deranged P.O.V., since for most of the movie he views her as a treasure. (Hill is a lot more comfortable risking charges of misogyny than he is the appearance of racism.) Celia Weston is terrific as Ronnie's booze-soaked mother, who, when asked, confidently assures him that, yes, he is the reason his father deserted them; she and Rogen develop a sweetly dysfunctional rapport. And Michael Pena, whose roles in such pictures as World Trade Center and Lions for Lambs didn't give him much of a chance to show off his comedy chops, is a revelation as Ronnie's lisping, strutting sidekick, whose departure from the movie at the two-thirds mark leaves a gaping hole in the screen that never gets filled back in.

One reason that Pena is so effective here is that, for much of the picture, he keeps you guessing whether his character is really deranged or if he's executing a massive put-on, and you finally get your answer. Part of the problem with Observe and Report is that when it's over, you're left wondering if the moviemakers intended to leave some of its uglier implications unchallenged, or at least open to interpretation. There are scenes where you may assume that the movie has disappeared into Ronnie's self-glorifying fantasy life, and when we don't get the scene where he's forced to wake up, it's the filmmakers' grasp on reality that comes into question. This is especially true when Ronnie is confronted by a real physical threat and, against all odds, comes through as a hero, and it's even truer when, wielding disproportionate force against a minor irritant and behaves like a dangerous lunatic, only to be treated as if he were really heroic. On the whole, I found Observe and Report a lot funnier, and much better acted, than Burn After Reading, which was the last movie I saw whose core message seemed to be that the filmmakers must be really smart guys to come up with such idiotic characters and have them behave with such consistent stupidity. But at least that movie ended on a note that was true to its premises, whereas Hill sets Ronnie up as a born loser who can't see what's in front of him, only to betray everything he's set up in the final reel. If he didn't do this out of fear that the movie would bomb if he didn't end on a triumphant note, it's hard to imagine what else he could have had in mind. He still manages to avoid seeming to condescend to his characters. Condescending to the audience may be another story.