Holding Out for a Hero: ‘Paul Blart: Mall Cop’ and ‘Observe and Report’ at 15 [Retrospective]

On January 16, 2009, Paul Blart: Mall Cop was released in theaters. A Happy Madison-produced family comedy about a bumbling mall security guard played by Kevin James who must step up and become a hero when organized thieves take over his shopping center, the film was a huge box office success, enjoying two weeks as number one at the box office and earning a worldwide gross of $183 million over its $26 million budget—despite by being panned by critics and eliciting a tepid response from audiences (it earned a B from the general audience survey website Cinemascore, typically read as a failing grade for what is supposed to be an easily-accessible PG comedy). It retained enough of a presence within the cultural consciousness and had the earnings to warrant a lesser-performing sequel six years later, and is now largely remembered through the veneer of ironic memes as a mostly unfunny relic of the world fifteen years ago. 

On April 10, 2009, Observe and Report was released in theaters. An R-rated dark comedy from the more niche writer/director Jody Hill—at this time known mostly for his Danny McBride-starring comedy series Eastbound and Down, now known for The Righteous Gemstones—it also follows a mall security guard, this one played by Seth Rogen and named Ronnie Barnhardt, who makes it his mission to stop a flasher that has been terrorizing women in the parking lot. The film had decidedly less success than Paul Blart, opening at number four at the domestic box office, finishing its worldwide run at $27 million, receiving a ‘C’ Cinemascore, and getting hit with mixed reviews from critics that were nonetheless more positive on the whole than Blart had received. Regardless, even among contemporary and current fans of the Apatow-adjacent comedy troupe/style that populates Observe and Report, it has largely faded into relative obscurity, now purely a cult object that some film fans believe got a raw deal in 2009.

Fifteen years on, Paul Blart and Observe and Report pose an interesting conversation between one another. No, not just because of their conspicuously close release timing, a phenomenon within the film industry that has been studied and documented, and not simply because of the differing demographics for the two similarly-premised films. But more so what it actually means that these two films with this specific subject matter were released together—movies about fledgling, inept, unskilled men that take it upon themselves to become all-American heroes, looking for the glory and validation within their roles as wanna-be cops. Specifically, Observe and Report acts as a direct inverse to Paul Blart. Whereas the latter uses its structure as an all-ages comedy to allow Blart as a character to successfully engage in a newfound sense of courage and bravery, the former, in its more adult subject matter, more incisively looks at the type of fragile and violent male ego that develops a thirst for power and a hotheaded hero complex in their piffling role as a mall security guard. 

The commercial success of Blart and the bombing of Report speaks to a greater national delusion concerning the idea of heroism, as well as a crass romanticizing of individuals in roles adjacent to cops. True, pragmatically Blart’s success also came from targeting a broader demographic and beating Report to the punch with the comedic mall cop milieu. Still, these two specific movies releasing at the same time with the agreeable, uncomplicated nature of Blart winning out to the point of wiping Observe and Report out of the collective memory is representative of a police-obsessed populace that shields itself from the knowledge that the Paul Blarts of the world are realistically more like the Ronnie Barnhardts. 

An important note that each movie makes about both Blart and Ronnie is that they couldn’t make it as actual cops. Blart is in training at the beginning of his film but fails because of his physical limitations due to his hypoglycemia, and Ronnie looks at becoming a cop midway through Report but fails the psychological examination because of his decision to quit the medication treating his bipolar disorder and his psychopathic, disturbed perception of police work. Despite their failings, by the end of each film, each man has convinced the world of their respective valor. The difference is that Blart’s actions are played with a straightforward earnestness as he saves the day through his blundering slapstick and throwaway one-liners. When Ronnie saves the day—by shooting the flasher point blank in the middle of the mall with grossly realistic blood spray splattering the ground and Rogen—the audience can read the dark irony of a world that celebrates the heroism of a man like this, one obsessed with recognition achieved through brutality and retribution. 

Indeed, though most audiences were led to believe Observe and Report was simply a raunchy comedy about an in-over-his-head security guard, it plays more like a parodic 21st-century version of Taxi Driver, in which Ronnie succumbs to his own Travis Bickle-like radicalized vigilantism. This is no accident: Jody Hill has said the filmmaking team intentionally pulled from Taxi Driver as well as another scathing Robert De Niro-starring American indictment from Martin Scorsese, The King of Comedy. In taking up the De Niro role, Rogen perfectly locates this particular brand of thwarted, fragile masculinity; the kind of man incapable of self-reflection and with an all-too-eager trigger finger. He’s brash and impulsive, but also resentful and malcontent within the malaise of his life. It’s why when Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta) is brought in to investigate sudden robberies within the mall that coincide with the arrival of the flasher, Ronnie repudiates his assistance, insisting that this is his case to crack. 

Despite this, Ronnie clearly looks toward Harrison for some kind of validation, most evident when Ronnie tags along for a ride-along wherein Harrison sets him up and leaves him stranded in an unsavory part of town. After a brief foray into grindhouse-style extreme violence in which Ronnie brutally takes down a group of drug dealers (led by Danny McBride), he brings in a kid who seemingly tried to sell him drugs to be arrested and delivers a line to Harrison that encompasses his entire ethos: “I knew you wanted to see if I had the chops to become a police officer. I did it, man. I did it. There are six dead crackheads that can confirm that.” Don’t forget the literal child he brought in to be detained.

Ronnie has several instances of dialogue like this throughout the film, which betray his inner desire for vicious vigilante justice. The most striking may be the monologue he delivers to the police examiner who rules on his psychological capability to become a cop. Ronnie explains a recurring dream that he has, in which a serene scene of kids on a playground is overtaken by a dark cloud of “cancer and pus,” before Ronnie steps in with “the biggest fucking shotgun you’ve ever seen in your whole life,” as he “blows every fucking thing away.” Afterward, as all the defenseless innocents he saved idolize and thank him, he replies, “You don’t need to thank me. I’m just a guy with a gun. I’m just a cop.” Ronnie is the man desperate to be a cop so he can fire a gun—the man who compulsively desires any semblance of power and authority, even the meager amount that comes with being a mall security guard. 

It’s no wonder such an uncomfortable perception of this profession didn’t exactly win over audiences, and it’s only natural that the sanded-down, amicable humor of Blart won over at the box office and in the general zeitgeist. Blart makes no allusions to any form of mental instability experienced by its title character, only his propensity for screw-ups—but a clumsy hero is still a hero, and Blart is depicted as effortlessly doing right by his community and those close to him. Such is the case when he valiantly refuses to leave the seized shopping center after realizing the woman he pines after, Amy Anderson (Jayma Mays), is being held hostage. Blart saves the day, gets the girl, and even refuses an offer to join the police force in favor of staying on as mall security because it’s where he feels he can make a difference. It’s all perfectly neat and tidy, as a movie like this typically is. 

Ronnie gets the girl too, but not the girl he initially wanted. For the entirety of the film, he pines after the rather capricious and flighty make-up counter girl Brandi (Anna Farris), spending the film working up the courage to ask her out on a date. He constantly yearns for her while staring at her across the mall, similar to the way Blart watches Amy over the security cameras in an unintentional parallel indictment of how both these men exhibit vaguely stalker-type behavior. Blart’s longing is depicted as the wholesome, genuine emotion of a lonely but kindhearted man, while Ronnie’s is outlined with the desperation of someone unable to reckon with his noxious sense of masculinity—the same type of man who thinks he’s owed something by any woman whom he affords his attention.

This all leads to the slightly infamous date night sequence after Brandi acquiesces and agrees to dinner with Ronnie. After allowing her to overdose on his clonazepam at the restaurant, he takes her home and date rapes her while she’s seemingly unconscious. It’s only when he stops to check on her do we realize that she is somewhat lucid, but Hill isn’t exactly subtle about what he wants to convey here. Ronnie is a man that is okay with taking what he feels he is owed, which is why he blows up so intensely later in the film, destroying Brandi’s make-up counter and calling her a bitch in front of the entire store after he sees her and Harrison having sex. Meanwhile, he is oblivious to the slight flirtations of Nell, the earnest food-court counter girl who offers him a free coffee every day, until he has already burned the bridge with Brandi and he’s kissed by Nell, a burgeoning relationship between the two suggested as the film closes.

As previously alluded, both characters receive a happy ending—naturally for the tone of Blart, but with more of an underhanded sense of caustic warning when it comes to Report. Hill seems to argue, just as Scorsese did with Travis Bickle, that the world will continue rewarding men like this unless we, as a society, develop enough of a backbone to recognize and admonish the type of callous, brutal manhood on display through Ronnie’s actions—unless we reject the polished, squeaky clean, goofy mugging of how Paul Blart perceives the same archetype. There are millions of Ronnie Barnhardts in the world living by his same adage like a religion: “The world has no use for another scared man. Right now, the world needs a fucking hero.” The world is all too ready to be convinced of that as the truth. 

Paul Blart: Mall Cop was released by Columbia Pictures on January 15, 2009 and is available to stream/rent via Amazon. Observe and Report was released by Warner Bros on April 10, 2009 and is available to stream on Cinemax and MAX.

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Trace Sauveur

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