Maybe Seth Rogen and his crew are not that funny. Or maybe they are just funny when they are with Steve Carrell or Paul Rudd. Without those two, things just do not seem to work.
40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up were hilarious. But Superbad, Pineapple Express, and Observe and Report have been representative of a steady decline by this particular comedic troop. Truthfully, I guess O&R was funnier than Pineapple Express; maybe not. They are both so close in being sub-par that maybe it is not even worth it to argue which one was better.
Just in some off chance that Seth actually reads this, genitalia are not funny. I will even go so far as to not lock that statement to male genitalia, although that is definitely the core issue for me. But, in general, human genitalia are not funny in and of themselves, and this seems to be a recurring attempt that Seth and his crew make. Superbad is an ok movie; the ending, centered on the issue above, drives it below the mediocre line. Seth tries the same lame attempt at humor with the culminating capture of the flasher at the end of O&R. It fails to work this time as well.
Observe and Report is just sad in some places. This is one of those movies that definitely meets the cliché that "you've seen every funny part in the trailer and commercials." The telling part of the flick is that you never really feel supportive of the protagonist. Likewise, in order for this kind of humor to work, you need to despise the antagonist, or at least think that they are a complete loser. You really don't get that from Ray Liotta's character, and the other "bad guys", the mall thief and the flasher, are not big or comedic enough threats to make the humor even relevant to the story line.
Most of the time, in fact, you feel like Rogen's protagonist is the loser. Without giving too much of the movie away, you wish the same thing that most of the other characters in the movie ask: for him to shut the heck up. The movie makes an attempt to play on the humor of him being a Don Quixote in modern times. However, you never feel that there is anything even humorously noble about the character.
The night that I went to see the movie, I had to pack for a road trip the following day. I wound up packing when I got home after the movie, and some more the following morning. Yardstick statement: I would have rather been at home packing that night rather than in the theatre for two hours watching Observe and Report.This movie gets a score of two out five stars from the 'WERKz. There was a good chunk of potentially funny material here. But most of the time, you just feel sad for O&R's Barney and actually really feel that he just has some severe psychological problems that make him a loo-paw. This is even when you suspend disbelief and try and say "it's just a movie." The extreme spectrum-ends of the climax, where severely serious incidents occur that are downplayed as slapstick just left me feeling jerked around between trying to find the funny amidst the deranged and then violent events occurring on screen.
The original ending of Clerks was going to be Dante getting shot. The directors realized that this type of abrupt, violently serious ending to a comedic piece just does not work generally speaking. I am glad that they changed it and ended with the Randal walk. Seth could have learned a bit from this and ended the movie with an culminating stroke of comedy instead of his actual approach.
If you need to see every Seth Rogen film ever made, you can wait to see this one on video. In fact, this movie is why I sometimes don't see a problem with so-called video piracy, because paying for this "entertainment" is questionable. If you were just looking for a decent comedy, please move along people. There is nothing to see here.