Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
JUST when I thought things couldn’t get worse after last week’s horror show, I somehow got roped into seeing another ‘comedy’ this week.
As it turns out, the only funny part of my evening was trying to decide whether Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 was as bad as The Cobbler was. In the end, I had to call it a draw.
Perhaps its biggest crime is that it’s pretty much identical to the first film, which in itself was about as amusing as an aneurysm.
Director Andy Fickman decided that it would be utterly ludicrous if the sequel featured another gang of thieves trying to take down the West Orange Pavilion Mall. So instead, our hero heads to Vegas (the originality is astounding …) and the Wynn Hotel. And, inevitably bumps into a gang of thieves trying to take it down.
Said hero is Kevin James as the eponymous mall cop, who, as you might have just gathered, isn’t even a mall cop anymore. He’s as useful as a chocolate fireguard but somehow, through blatant slapstick ineptitude, manages to deny the bunch of villains trying to pull off an artwork heist at every turn.
The entire film takes place within the hotel, but unfortunately ends up coming across more as an advertisement for it than an actual movie. I wasn’t expecting the second coming of The Shining, but still, there’s got to be more to the setting than a few external establishing shots and then shoehorning the logo into every frame possible.
James is ridiculous as Blart and I guess he plays his part exactly as you’d expect. He’s loud, obnoxious and a complete idiot. It’s undoubtedly supposed to make him loveable, and probably does to a certain audience, but he comes across as the stereotypical doughnut-munching cop to me, and the sad thing is that most of the time it doesn’t appear that the parody is self-conscious.
The movie opens with Blart’s life in a shambles, as his true love and wife who he spent the whole of the first film wooing left him after six days of marriage (there is no real reason given for this, so in reality it probably means the actress asked for too high a fee so was told to shove it). Beyond that, he still gets no respect as a mall security officer, and now he even has to face the fact that his daughter is growing up.
When a head-clearing opportunity to attend the Security Officers’ Trade Association conference in Vegas comes up, Blart is on the first plane.
Naturally, to stay true to the formula, there needs to be some sort of enemy and an evil plot, so also staying at The Wynn is Vincent (Neal McDonough). Vincent and his large team are out to steal a dozen different pieces of art for an unnamed buyer, and not surprisingly Blart is the only one who can stop them. Déjà vu, anyone?
It wasn’t terribly funny the first time out and it’s even worse now. The situations get even dafter – apparently this is the way of going ‘bigger and better’, and the same problems and inconsistencies with the supporting characters and their characterisations show up again. There’s a decent cast, but they don’t show anything remotely like their potential.
Even more frustrating is when the film flops between two polar opposites of genius and incompetence depending on what joke or part of the story needs servicing.
At one moment Blart operates entirely by the book and refuses to sway from his moral spectrum, but the next moment he refuses to hand over his driver’s license so that he can try out a Segway. At various points in the film, we see Blart’s utter inability to shoot a gun straight, but when it comes down to crunch time his aim is deadly. Then there are moments when Blart has trouble stringing together two sentences in front of people, and other times when he can deliver a full speech off the cuff.
I could go on and on as the film is full of these inconsistencies, but you get the point.
This is a film that aims at delivering the most simple and easiest of jokes, most of which are riffled directly from the original film. But it can’t even do that.
It’s a sad indictment that an industry which once produced the likes of Monty Python, Laurel & Hardy and Spinal Tap is now relegated to vomiting out drivel like this on a regular basis. I can’t remember the last ‘comedy’ I went to see that had me in stitches consistently (for the right reasons), and that’s a sorry state of affairs.
