REVIEW: Paul

Dir.: Greg Mottola

With: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Seth Rogen.

It is such a shame that good comedies are so hard to come by. I like Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and I was really hoping that their third collaboration would be at least as good, if not better, than their previous films. Sadly, ‘Paul’ is a veeeery mediocre movie. There are some good ideas in it and I think the basic concept of having a film about a badass alien is great in itself, but it seems like these ideas weren’t taken far enough for them to be actually amusing.Seth Rogen was a good choice to voice Paul, the wisecracking, E.T.-gone-bad alien. Some of his stunts are entertaining but overall his character is pretty flat too. The only real highlight of the film was Paul encountering a devout creationist girl and ruining her whole belief system just by existing.

Apparently, ‘Paul’ is full of references to other famous sci-fi movies, I’ve only picked up a couple and maybe this marred my appreciation of it, but still, it’s just not very funny. There were a couple of moments when I smirked but nothing stands out in my mind apart from a very fine cameo by Sigourney Weaver. It’s like they really expected the audiences to laugh just because the words faggot and cocksucker are mentioned about 50 times throughout the duration of the film. Don’t get me wrong, these words can be very funny when used sporadically and at opportune moments but in ‘Paul’ the script simply relies on swear words as if it was written by a 10-year-old.

It’s not like I expect comedies to have an amazing plot with unexpected twists and turns (just think of ‘Airplane!’) but at least some sign of respect for the audience’s intelligence would be nice.