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Plot Summary
Bargain hunters at Forest Ridge Mall get more than they bargained for: a chubby flasher in a ratty bathrobe. They're repulsed. Security guard Ronnie Barnhardt isn't: "This disgusting pervert is the best thing that ever happened to me!" Catching the flasher may be his ticket to a real police job and to romance with a hot cosmetics-counter princess. Only one thing stands between Ronnie and destiny: a tall, handsome cop who actually knows what he's doing. Seth Rogen (Knocked Up), Anna Faris (the Scary Movie series) and Ray Liotta (GoodFellas) star in this mall-to-wall comedy covering acres of wild, sometimes raunchy, up-in-your-grill funny - all under one roof.
Credits
Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews
TOMATOMETER
51%- Reviews Counted: 201
- Fresh: 102
- Rotten: 99
- Average Rating: 5.5/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Fresh: It falls short of brilliant but it's a lot more daring than what passes for 'dark comedy' these days, and it reminds us that 'feel bad' comedies may not always be as funny as 'feel good' ones but, when they work, they can ultimately be more satisfying.
Rotten: I don't think it's much of a comedy. The darkness overpowers everything.
Rotten: You don't relate or enjoy watching Seth Rogen's character on screen.
Fresh: If you enjoy this film, it might just be time to examine the stability of your own psychological wellbeing. I loved Observe and Report, and that's a terrifying reality I have to deal with.
Customer Reviews
Fun Dark Comedy
This movie is a fun Seth Rogan movie. The humor is dark and wonderful. I want to say to everyone who loves seth rogan and dark comedy this is a movie for you. Put yes if you agree or no if you dont.
Seth Rogen: Obnoxious Mall Cop
When I saw twenty minutes of Paul Blart: Mall Cop, I thought surely this would be the year’s worst movie about a pudgy security guard. Now I think that this effort from Jody Hill, also the creator of HBO’s Eastbound & Down, may have reached an unexpected new low. Seth Rogen, who usually plays amiable slackers, reveals unexpected depths (signaled by his close-cropped hairstyle). As a self-aggrandizing, bipolar head of mall security, he’s downright obnoxious most of the time. Like Paul Blart, he has a thing for a mall employee (Anna Faris), but she’s pretty obnoxious too. Ray Liotta plays his nemesis, a cop he’s trying to outsmart in solving the case of a parking-lot flasher. Hard to know who to root for, but our hero’s technique is to blame it on the dark-skinned Muslim guy who has a restraining order on him. I’m not saying a comedy can’t have a unlikeable main character (see Bad Santa), but it shouldn’t also ask the audience to find him charming, as (I think) Hill does. And I’m not saying a comedy needs to have documentary realism, but if it’s going to exaggerate it should, you know, have a point. Why is it funny that Faris’s character is so distraught after being flashed that she can’t walk and has to be carried? Or that the trigger-happy schmuck who carries her wouldn’t have gotten hired to be a 7-11 manager, let alone a security head? (To be fair, it’s apparently such a small mall that there are only four other guards.) And I’m not saying that drug abuse, male frontal nudity, and rampant profanity can’t be funny, but it should look like there was a thought behind the smut besides, hey look, it’s an R-rated comedy. Hill seems so intent on avoiding the sappy family-movie predictability of a Paul Blart that he’s made something that, while mostly not formulaic, is genuinely disagreeable. Possibly if you mashed up the two movies they would, like matter meeting antimatter, explode and produce something both novel and funny. It’s a tough call whether this was more odious than Martin Lawrence’s National Security, but I’ll be on my, ahem, guard for any more movies from this comedy subgenre. I'd give this one and a half, if I could, for occasionally being funny, as when Celia Weston, as the rent-a-cop’s drunken mom, tells him that, yes, it probably was his fault that Dad left them.
Not that great, but the ending is PERFECT.
If you like funny movies where the ending leaves you feeling uplifted and happy, buy this. The whole movie is kind of slow, but the ending comes out of nowhere and acts as the perfect exclamation point to an otherwise decent movie.
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- $14.99
- Genre: Comedy
- Released: 2009
- © 2009 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Legendary Pictures. All rights reserved.
Also Available
- Observe and Report (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
- explicit
- Various Artists