I haven't seen the original Paul Blart: Mall Cop, though the hugely successful film has its defenders, even among critics. Roger Ebert awarded it three stars and praised it for being "a slapstick comedy with a hero who is a nice guy," and extols star Kevin James as a combination of Jackie Gleason and Nathan Lane.
He's not wrong. Kevin James is without a doubt a powerful comic presence and his character, Paul Blart, is certainly a nice guy. But in the case of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, it's the movie around him that's nasty and mean-spirited. No one in his or her right mind would wish the happenings in this movie on a person as genuine as Paul Blart. Considering that James created the character and wrote both films alongside Nick Bakay, it looks like he's as much to blame for the movie's failure as he is for its few successes.
This sequel continues an unmistakable mean streak in the oeuvre of Adam Sandler, its producer. Like Grown Ups 2, it's a celebration of almost caveman-like masculinity, at the expense of anything that deviates from the normative. It's a shame, because in the slapstick scenes James makes Paul Blart into a meek, overweight Chaplin-type shlub who might have been a formidable comic hero if the movie were as sensitive as he is.
As I've said, Paul Blart is a nice guy. That doesn't mean he's likable. He's the kind of guy who waves to you from his front porch every morning when you get the paper, after which you nod and hurry inside before he tries to talk to you. He's the type who's a little too talkative when he catches you arriving home from work, and doesn't take the visual cues as you slowly back away toward your front door.
It's Paul Blart's niceness that makes us pity him rather than sympathize with him, and it doesn't help that the movie is downright awful to him from moment one. The first five minutes, honestly, had me gobsmacked. After a brief recap of the events of the first film, it's revealed that Paul Blart's love interest (Jayma Mays) left him after six days of marriage. It's okay, he thinks: he still has his daughter (Raini Rodriguez) and his mother (Shirley Knight). Then his mother is hit by a milk truck. It's one of those CGI-created "funny" hit-by-car scenes that's for some reason become common in comedies nowadays (Mean Girls, the Scary Movie films, etc.), in which everything seems perfectly pleasant and ho boy! There goes a truck or a bus or something big.
It is inconceivable that anyone, particularly someone who's been in the business of comedy as long as James has, would think it was okay to begin any comedy this way, never mind a big-studio mainstream family-oriented PG-rated one. I wonder if audiences were indeed rolling in the aisles as they watched Shirley Knight get bowled over. I wonder if they're the same people who laughed as Donald Trump mocked the disabled reporter who questioned him.
As soon as Mrs. Blart is run over by the truck, the movie is dead. No movie can recover from such a disastrous misstep. The last 90 minutes of the movie could have been the entirety of Horse Feathers and it still would have been awful.
So when Paul Blart goes to Las Vegas to attend a security convention at which he's convinced he will be the keynote speaker, there isn't much reason to care. His mother's death admittedly isn't written for entirely crass reasons; it's meant to lend a desperation to the character, as he becomes overly protective of his daughter Maya, who is afraid to tell him she wants to go to UCLA rather than New Jersey Community College. While they're in Vegas, Maya stumbles upon an art heist and is kidnapped, and it's up to Paul to save her.
The bad guy, a slithery, well-dressed Wall Street type named Vincent, is played by Neal McDonough with such straight-faced dedication that he ends up delivering most of the movie's real laughs. McDonough is one of the best conventional baddies out there, and this movie suggests he's due for a Christopher Walken-like second career as a comic foil. Other than two no-good-very-bad scenes--one in which he conveniently blurts out the fact that he has an allergy to oatmeal, so that a character can rub some oatmeal in his face later to defeat him, and another in which he and Blart trade a series of silly lines about how crazy they both are--McDonough's performance is flawlessly smug.
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Some of the movie's slapstick works. I found myself laughing at a scene in which Blart is completely unable to incapacitate a villain with a stungun. A scene in which he fights a giant peacock seems right out of nowhere, but works on a surreal level because of a completely deadpan performance from a nearby lounge pianist who witnesses the whole thing.
When the movie is in slapstick mode, it's considerably easier to take than when it attempts to be a comedy of manners. The script is generally unkind to women, even beyond Blart's patriarchal attitude toward Maya. When one woman (Jackie Sandler, Adam's wife) rebuffs the advances of a very drunk security officer (Nicholas Turturro), she is of course painted as a judgmental shrew. The character who's set up as Blart's love interest, hotel manager Divina (Daniella Alonso), shows absolutely no interest in him nor any chemistry with him, but the movie dictates that she has to fall in love with him anyway... and then, when he turns her down, the movie dictates again that she needs to fall for the head of hotel security (Eduardo Verastegui).
As bad as Paul Blart: Mall Cop is, I'm interested in checking out the first film to see if it does the character right. I can imagine a good movie being made around Paul Blart, if it's kind-spirited and knows how to treat him. This isn't it.
* 1/2 out of ****
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