Midway through Observe and Report, the humor turns unbelievably nasty.This Seth Rogen comedy about mall cop Ronnie Barnhardt becomes a haven for the benighted, envious and spiritually small. He goes from being an underdog rent-a-cop wannabe to a vengeful shit, obsessed with capturing a flasher as if going after Osama bin Laden.This mania focuses Ronnie’s failures as the son of an alcoholic mother (Celia Weston), rejected by a local police detective (Ray Liotta), rebuffed by the mall’s slutty perfume salesgirl (Anna Faris). Ronnie vents his annoyance on skateboarders in the mall parking lot, busting heads like a samurai; then he pursues the flasher with crazed single-mindedness (through explicit reference to Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle).Violence in the unimaginatively titled Observe and Report is loud and blunt—making it the ugliest, most hate-filled comedy since Borat.

What happened to writer-director Jody Hill, whose debut last year, The Foot Fist Way, was a benevolent, original look at mediocrity? Danny McBride’s martial arts instructor boasted his aim “to build a more peaceable world,” but his oafishness got in the way. In Observe and Report, Ronnie’s arrogance is never chastised; it’s validated through a series of vigilante set pieces—including one where he kills Danny McBride in a cameo as a low-life drug dealer.Yes, kills. The violence strays way out of proportion to Hill’s humor about American eccentricity.

Cartoonish like Pineapple Express,this crude legacy of Animal House’s frat-boy humor suggests a townie’s revenge—as if Hill were sympathizing with the closed-minded frustrations of America’s resentful classes. Surely the use of Bob Dylan’s high-toned “When I Paint My Masterpiece” is meant to be ironic. Hill’s class-consciousness is the antithesis of Anvil.

Ronnie is a renegade: but not in the good way of downscale comic figures such as Tyler Perry’s Madea and Larry the Cable Guy. Ronnie’s credo—“The world has no use for another scared man. Right now the world needs a hero”—sounds like vigilante bigotry, a Bad Santa–influenced view wringing laughs out of Ronnie’s contempt for a sneaky Muslim sales clerk who molests customers:They toss F-bombs at each other in screwy pantomime with a viciously xenophobic payoff. Other characters (such as Michael Peña’s criminal Dennis) verge on racist caricature.

Rogen’s hurt-child pout and baby-faced, foul-mouthed hostility perfects the lout Kevin Smith always plays; something’s genuine, yet it’s a nasty revelation—unlike Kevin James’ kindhearted clown in Paul Blart:Mall Cop.

Big-budget filmmaking gets Hill more mainstream attention than did Foot Fist Way, but with that budget comes a coarsened viewpoint. A supervisor’s alarm (“Are you fuckin’ retarded, Ronnie?”) is just another vulgarity. Is Hill a redneck Neil LaBute, developing a new style of misanthropy but with an Apatow fixation on adolescent penis jokes? Ronnie’s heroism comes from apprehending the mall’s dick-swinging pervert.

But this isn’t art; it’s just flashing.