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The two-doofus comedy probably goes back to ancient times, so why not set it there? The always-funny Michael Cera and the frequently-funny Jack Black join forces like Hope and Crosby in an only intermittently-funny movie that is just a series of sketches set in ancient days -- prehistoric, Biblical, Roman, and Egyptian. Cera plays Oh, a gatherer, and Black is Zed, a hunter. They are pals who are evicted from their stone-age village and wander off, meeting up with Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, and the residents of Sodom. In yet another "what was the MPAA thinking" moment, the film has been assigned a PG-13 rating, despite jokes about incest, circumcision, orgies, castration, and ingestion of human waste.

The juxtaposition of modern sensibility and prehistory provides some funny contrasts. Oh and Zed are amazed to see their first wheel and when they ride in their first vehicle they raise their arms as though they were in a roller-coaster, even though it cannot keep up with a guy strolling alongside. And then they get their first carsickness. Some things are eternal -- like insecurity with the opposite sex, bullies, and the bad guys having English accents. And it is fun to see a modern perspectives combined with ancient situations.

But more doesn't work than does. Cain does not just kill Abel; he pounds him -- and any potential for humor -- into the ground. It isn't enough that a pagan priest be corrupt and gay; he has to be hairy. The movie is too spotty to be comic and too listless to be heretical. There's no point to it, just a series of gags -- in both senses of the word.

I have no affection for this movie but I have to admit to a grudging admiration for its willingness to be awkward, intrusive, and disturbing. A stark contrast to the similarly-themed and similarly plotted Paul Blart Mall Cop of just three months ago, this could easily have been a raunchier take on the same easy targets -- mall shops, mall music, mall food, and mall shoppers as a proxy for an America that is soft in the middle and narcotized by things that can be bought by credit cards.

But writer/director Jody Hall (of the cult favorite "The Foot Fist Way") makes comic movies with so much edge they can give you a paper cut. He does not go for the easy laugh that makes you feel good about yourself, you know, the one that lulls audiences into thinking that their families are not dysfunctional, just quirky, and that their pain makes them authentic and charming. This movie is funny but it is upsetting and very dark.

The overall structure of the movie is very much like the mall cop movie of just three months ago, "Paul Blart." Both are about would-be policemen who take our their frustration with petty enforcements when they are not mooning over a pretty mall employee.

But where "Paul Blart" was cute and gentle, "Observe and Report" is harsh and bleak. There are no cheery pop songs on the soundtrack to let us know they are just kidding. And there is not much in the way of lessons learned or getting in touch with the life force. Seth Rogen plays Ronnie, a sad, lonely, and angry man who is borderline delusional. He lives with his alcoholic mother. He yearns for Brandi (a fearless Anna Faris), who works at a department store cosmetics counter. He bitterly resents Detective Henderson (Ray Liotta), who is assigned to investigate reports of a flasher who has been harassing women in the parking lot. In a subversion of the usual movie tropes, he decides to ride to the occasion and resolve the flasher case himself as a way of proving himself. But his instincts are skewed and he makes a series of poor judgments and expensive mistakes that are played for comedy.

Rogen, Faris, Celia Weston as Ronnie's mother, and Michael Pena as his second in command manage the difficult material well, but Hall is more adept as writer (and selector of esoteric songs for the soundtrack) than as a director. The tone may be even more harsh than intended just due to an uncertain control of narrative and character. Hill says he was inspired by Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" and "King of Comedy," but he needs to do a bit more observing and reporting of his own to make sure he understands what makes those movies work.

"The Goods" is an unabashedly outrageous comedy about a team of hard-charging, harder-living, hardest-partying "mercenary" car salesmen who go from town to town for short-term sales promotions, racking up huge sales numbers, eating take-out, going to strip clubs, getting wasted, and having sex. They like to talk about how they don't break the rules, but they bend them pretty far. They have each other's back and don't trust civilians (anyone who has settled down in one place). They behave immaturely but they think a lot of themselves, and we know this because they tell us. In very graphic terms.

I know what you're thinking: Apatow, Sandler, or Ferrell?

It's Ferrell (whose cameo is one of the movie's highlights). Will Ferrell's production company is behind this movie, which explains how it manages to be both nasty and genial. Jeremy Piven tweaks his "Entourage" character as Don Ready, a guy who can talk his way into or out of just about anything, including not just being allowed to smoke on a plane but being cheered by every passenger and flight attendant for each puff. Farrell regulars David Koechner, Rob Riggle, Kathryn Hahn, and Craig Robinson are joined by "The Hangover's" Ed Helms and Ken Jeong, the "look, I'm not really the stiff you think I am" James Brolin and Alan Thicke, and the "I define what is cool" Ving Rhames.

Humor can serve many purposes, and one of the most enduring is the chance to see someone say and do things we are not allowed to, and then get away with it, and then not get away with it. The guys who say offensive things are not as bad as the guys who do offensive things but are not manly enough to be profane. And that is the foundation of this film. It's Ferrell's viral sensation "The Landlord" made with (chronological) adults. This is slash and burn, shock and awe comedy and it's cheery outrageousness makes enough of it work to, in Don Ready's terms, make the sale.

Yes, this is a dumb little teen sex comedy that repeatedly tries to generate hilarity with a cheer involving the initials of its title. Yes, it spends a lot of camera time focusing on tight little shorts on tight little tushes. Yes, it tries for the best of both worlds by presenting us with heroes who are major playas for most of the film with some lessons learned and spiritually enlarging experiences just in time for (and during) the closing credits. Yes, the high school junior heroes are played by actors who are at least a decade older than their characters. But as dumb little teen sex comedies go, this one could have been a lot worse.

Shawn (Nicholas D'Agosto) and Nick (Eric Christian Olsen) have just one goal -- to get with as many lovely young ladies as possible as frequently as possible. Very effective singly, they are all but unstoppable with each other as wingmen. When it is time to go to El Paso for football training camp, they decide that rather than go to hot, dry, girl-free Texas they will instead go where the girls are, cheerleading camp. Though the camp is three weeks long, they plan to leave early to spend time at a friend's vacation home.

Carly (Sarah Roemer), the captain of the cheerleaders, is a very attractive girl who is unprecedentedly impervious to Nick's charm (and also impervious to the obnoxiousness of her pretentious boyfriend). Shawn does very well with the cheerleaders but increasingly finds himself attracted to the co-cheerleader coach (Milly Sims), even though she is married to her co-coach (Michael John Higgins, born to do spirit fingers) and, in his word, "old." While Shawn and Nick are focused on getting as much as they can from as many girls as they can, the girls are focused on competing with the champion Panthers.

No surprises along the way -- except perhaps how poorly the cheerleading routines are photographed and how much you can get away with in a PG-13 movie -- but D'Agosto and Olsen have an easy rhythm and the movie wisely makes their comeuppances more sweet than humiliating. Its attempts to temper its homophobic humor are weak. But it nicely makes the point that the girls who get a boy's attention and respect are those who respect themselves enough to insist on trust and affection before they will get involved.

When things go wrong for us, it's tragedy. When they go wrong for someone else, it's funny. As Alan Dale says, comedy is a man in trouble. This comedy gives us four men in a lot of trouble following a debauched, drug-fueled bachelor party in Las Vegas who wake up with no recollection of what happened and no idea what has happened to one's missing tooth, another's missing mattress, and, most significantly, no groom. The one whose wedding is being celebrated, the one whose wedding is taking place the next day, has disappeared.

Meanwhile, there are some items in the trashed hotel room with the still-smoking chair that no one recalls having seen before, including a chicken, a tiger, and an infant. At the beginning of the evening, they toasted "to a night the four of us will never forget." By the next morning, the three remaining guys cannot remember anything that happened, and the rest of the movie has them racing all over to figure out where they went, what they did, and how the groom managed to disappear without a trace.

In one respect, it's just a cheerfully outrageous comedy, with much of the humor coming from our discovering along with the hapless trio of boy-men chafing at the bonds of civilization just how appallingly they have violated every possible standard of appropriate behavior and good taste. It's your basic best of both worlds comedy where we get to see our most childish wishes fulfilled and then get to see the characters on screen suffer the punishment for it. But it is also a whacked-out variation on "The Wizard of Oz," with characters in need of a heart, a brain, and courage going on a journey to an exotic land and learning that there's no place like home.

Doug (Justin Bartha) is about to get married and so his two best friends take him to Las Vegas for one last bachelor blow-out. They are Phil (Bradley Cooper), a teacher who is married with a son and says that he hates his life in need of a heart, and Stu ("The Office's" Ed Helms) an uptight dentist who is about to propose to his controlling, unfaithful shrew of a girlfriend, who needs some nerve. That leaves Alan (comedian Zach Galifianakis) who is lacking brains. He's along for the ride because he is the bride's brother. And the gorgeous mint-condition Mercedes convertible is what they are riding in, thanks to what is inevitably going to be shown to be a very foolish gesture on the part of the prospective father-in-law. The wicked witch part, of course, is shared by nearly every woman on screen.

Cooper is a comic actor trapped in the very appealing body of a leading man and Helms (who gamely had his fake tooth removed for authenticity) provides able counterpoint as the conflicted Stu. Galifianakis looks like a cross between a Hobbit and a garden gnome and a little of him goes a long way, but he manages to be less obnoxious than expected. And they run into an engaging variety of characters along the way including an emergency room doctor, a drug dealer (Mike Epps), an effeminate gangster, an earthy wedding chapel manager, and of course an "escort" with a heart of good (a very game and, as ever, alluring and adorable Heather Graham).

The film's most disappointing element is its casual sexism. Aside from the escort, all of the women come across as shrewish and narcissistic. But other than that, like predecessors "Superbad" and "Pineapple Express," the movie has an essential sweetness that disinfects its raunchiest moments.

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