Summary - Very Good 3.5

40% LOL, 50% hide the women and children. Make that 80% hide the innocents, yet still 40% LOL, more than enough funny to get the job done. Yes, it’s spectacularly mean, violently so, but it’s no more cruelly subversive than was Borat. (Oh great. Now Borat marks the limits of acceptable taste. Talk about defining deviancy down.)

Variety’s Joe Leydon – in a generally positive review – neatly characterizes writer-director Jody Hill’s comically violent creation as Travis Bickle: Mall Cop. While many other reviewers are trashing the movie, hindsight should prove them wrong in the fullness of time. Sociologically interesting and damn funny, O&R will stand as a minor classic of middle-brow comedies, notable for deftly combining hilarity with social commentary about Hobbesian nastiness and brutality. To that end, my Edge ratings identify it as Nasty and Brutal. Short too, at just 86 minutes.

Acting - Great 4.0

Rogen’s Ronnie Barnhardt (barn heart?) wears his id¹ like a suit: Every impulse followed, never generous, rigorously self-centered, he perceives himself a meat eater in a hamburger world, more anti-mensch than übermensch. Gifted the movie hero’s ability to always prevail in hand-to-hand combat, he takes on all comers, ratifying his otherwise spectacularly ill advised self-confidence. A comic antihero for the ages, he kills it, in the comic sense of killing it.

Anna Faris sports a good 300 degrees worth of cleavage, more than enough for Rogen’s fantasist to lose his mind in. If only he could get her under his power… ah, ha, ha. With her spike heeled turn here as Brandi the cosmetics slut, the former House Bunny lays claim to the title Marylin Monroe for a New Millennium. That’s like royalty in Hollywood.

Danny McBride delivers another crazy funny turn as the evocatively titled Caucasian Crackhead, almost unrecognizable from that other drug-running nutcase he played in Pineapple Express.

The formidable Ray Liotta – looking more and more like Jack Lord – delivers a terrific turn as the real policeman who must put up with Rogen’s rent-a-shtick.

Relative newcomer Collette Wolfe makes a striking impression as the sweetheart-next-door. Could she be the next Amy Adams?

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¹ Freud defined the Id as the part of the personality structure focused on selfishness and instant self-gratification.

Film - Very Good 3.5

Blasting through taboos like passengers on a sociopathic freight train, Jody Hill’s characters plumb the depths of dysfunctional behaviors, cheerfully indulging in binge drinking, chronic alcoholism, hard drugs, uncontrolled anger and wanton cruelty. The film’s conceit is that these touchstones of the dark side exist in society, so why not bring them into the foreground and make them objects of ridicule? Intelligent people will disagree whether this works or is a good idea. It worked for me, and was damn funny to boot.

However, you gotta assume that the real Travis Bickles of the world won’t get the absurdity, instead seeing Ronnie Barnhardt as the guy they could become if only they were brave enough. That’s the day you won’t want to go to the mall.

Edge - Sordid 3.2

Sickly funny. Not for the faint of heart.

Ray Liotta nails Anna Faris in the back seat of his unmarked in brief but spectacular fashion. More shockingly, there is a scene of apparent date rape. Because of how that scene concludes, I'm noting it as Sex rather than Violence. Aside from the F-bomb battles, the movie's finale includes an extended scene of a blubbery flasher running frontally naked through the mall, making clear - if nothing else - why female nudity is preferred over male. In any case, I'm judging the scene more a matter of Rudeness than Sex.

Reality - Surreal 2.1

Two dozen stuntmen¹ alter reality quite a bit, helping to drive the movie into the realm of the Surreal: 2.1 times reality. I generally don’t set all three rFactors the same, but here it makes sense. The movie purports to show reality, but from a circumstantial and physical POV all of those stuntmen double up on how a melee-in-the-mall would really go down, while from a biological POV, the fact that our antiheros live to party on after downing countless tequila shots and a handful of Clonazepam pushes well beyond human toxicity tolerances. So I judged the whole shooting match to be 2X reality, plus a tenth to kick it over into Surrealism.

As to the movie’s take on humankind, many people may be this stupid but they’re not nearly all this mean. The movie’s cruel logic has almost every character consistently taking the low road, consequences be damned. In reality this would lead to lives that are nasty, brutish and short. From a cozily secure theater seat, it leads to a whole lot of funny business.

As to an unmonitored bipolar dude running amok in society, causing mayhem and sharing his Clonazepam, yep, the movie seems to have nailed a comic version of how that might look. He don’t need no more stinking meds. Hell No. He’s doing GREAT!
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¹ 22 to be exact, including stunt riggers and coordinators.

1 Comment

• Wick Apr 26, 2009 8:55PM

  Regarding Spaceghost’s Review
  Great review Spaceghost. I agree especially with how you characterized it as “funny and dangerous”. I was trying to get to that by likening it in some ways to Borat.

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