HAVING SEEN the trailer approximately three hundred times, my expectations for Observe and Report (Warner Bros.) were already somewhere around zero: Seth Rogen interrupting a newsanchor to correct her on his title, Seth Rogen making gun sounds with his mouth, Seth Rogen kissing a drunk girl who just lost her dinner on the sidewalk. But as bad as the trailer made this movie look, it had a much higher rate of laughs-per-minute than the scattered, witless real thing. If you do brave it, be prepared to be creeped out, grossed out, and, worst of all, bored.

Mall cop Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) starts out as Paul Blart’s not-so-nice cousin: he takes himself and his powerless job a little too seriously, imposes himself awkwardly on a makeup-counter girl named Brandi (Anna Faris), and offensively profiles just about everyone in his vicinity. He focuses his obsessive sleuthing efforts on capturing a pasty-white flasher who shows up in the parking lot to terrorize female shoppers and mall employees (especially Brandi, a circumstance Ronnie exploits to his “romantic” advantage). But by and by the flasher disappears, and without much explanation we’re watching Ronnie chase his dreams of becoming a real police officer, chucking his antidepressants and barreling through his physical training. By the time he finishes, his lack of medication has sent him spiraling into vortex of bipolar insanity, which fuels a deepening blackness in the movie's tone.

I’ve only summarized half of the random plot trails, most of which come to a grinding halt after few icky yards. Observe and Report feels roughly pieced together, only cohering in the relentlessly unlikable Ronnie. He’s written and played without any of Seth Rogen’s usual charm (think fast: when has Rogen ever played a repulsive character?), and as a result, feels more like an overused actor standing around deadpanning than he feels like a character with a backstory. He does have a backstory—his father left when he was born, and his mother is a disturbing, withered alcoholic—but even that feels like a cheap construction that the movie dumps as soon as it has provided its share of lame laughs. Every character is a hapless bottom-feeder calculated to be as difficult as possible to like, and, in that context, the cursefests, skateboard beatdowns, and bloody gunshots feel like an even dumber version of the last half-hour of Pineapple Express.

What is funny, aside from the lines already spoiled in the trailer, are some of the movie’s most genuinely shocking moments: Brandi’s unexpected slurring approval of what had previously appeared to be an in-progress date rape, a racism-fueled rivalry between Ronnie and a lecherous mall salesman, and, above all, the five solid minutes of the flasher’s disgusting, jangling junk. Perhaps the ways these scenes push the envelope—making you so uncomfortable for such an extended period of time that you eventually start laughing uncontrollably—is what’s leading critics to hail it as crazy, weird and subversive. It’s definitely all of the above, but after racking my brain for interpretations I might have missed, I’m convinced most of their exegesis is nonsense. Even if director Jody Hill had intended Observe and Report to be some sort of wry subversion, it’s too muddled, incoherent, and flat-out boring to be considered worthwhile by any measure.

The Apatow zeitgeist has railroaded shock-comedy almost all the way into the mainstream, usually as a potent coating for heartfelt, relationship-driven morality tales. In general, there’s always something to like no matter how momentarily grossed out you might be. But Observe and Report is all the extremeness without any of the wit or heart; its humor is exclusively in its shock value and a very few well-timed deliveries. There’s not a single line of sharp writing or a single joke that’s clever for more than sixty seconds. It’s like a kind of cultural sewage, just as decomposed and off-putting as the appetitive mall culture it purports to satirize. If we’re ever looking back for the precise moment the latest wave of R-rated comedies started to degenerate, we’ll have no trouble pinpointing Observe and Report as the beginning of the end.