[This review was originally published on February 18th 2011. It is being reprinted to coincide with the film’s US release today]
Paul‘s case isn’t helped by the fact that UK television has recently been showing repeats of Spaced. Where that show seamlessly fused iconic pop culture with everyday life in a style very much its own, Pegg and Frost’s latest cinematic outing is a leaden succession of references and broad gags that never develops any sort of identity.
The missing link is director Edgar Wright, who was presumably off shooting Scott Pilgrim and has Greg Mottola of Superbad behind the camera in his stead. The absence is keenly felt: whatever Pilgrim‘s problems, it showed how sharply focused Wright’s command of the language of the various media and their distinct iconographies is. It may not have been the most interesting story, but Wright was able to make Pilgrim‘s reality a cohesive convergence of its myriad influences. Mottola, on the other hand, shoots Paul in the same way he has his every other film and throws a cavalcade of references and throwbacks at the screen without much thought to justification or context, barely giving them room to qualify as gags. The result is a film that is neither here nor there, lacking Spaced‘s honesty and warmth, and feeling a little… well… alien.
Paul isn’t really a Pegg/Frost film at all. It’s Superbad with an alien acting as Mottola’s standard slacker-in-chief (voiced by Seth Rogen, of course, who plays the part in precisely the same way he has played his every other) and two geeks as the differentiating gimmick between this and the other comedies from the Rogen stable. Although credited as writers, Pegg and Frost’s participation reeks of more of brand consolidation than passion project, serving primarily to prove to studio executives that they can work their mojo in more standard commercial fare than the convention-breaking likes of Hot Fuzz or Shaun of the Dead.
If they really were the only contributors to Paul‘s screenplay, there are a disturbing number of signs that their adventures in Hollywood may be blunting their edge. Previously the masters of the disguised gag, here the question is whether the puported jokes can be qualified as such at all. The anithesis of Spaced‘s subtle wordplay and character work, Paul instead takes the stuff that Rogen’s (not Pegg or Frost’s) films have always found funny – swearing, flatulence, drugs – then repeats them over and over again without any effort in developing a build-up or much of a punchline. The single note of Kristen Wiig’s character, aside from being the required love interest and at the centre of an out-of-place and obnoxious anti-religious slant, is that she pointlessly inserts uninventive curses into her regular dialogue. Paul is a stoner alien who has knowledge and powers beyond the known galaxy but prefers to toke on a spliff and, yes, swear a lot. Because a bawdy alien is funny, right? Rather than using the character as the basis for building jokes, the character is the only joke. Over an hour and a half, that gets tiring.
The geek market has been identified as the one where Pegg and Frost hold the most appeal and that demographic is played to constantly. Or at least, it plays to what you’d imagine a studio executive thinks that demographic wants. The film’s first scene is a heavy-handed homage to Close Encounters (Spielberg is the primary reference source for much of the film), followed by an extended advert for Comic-Con where the two leads, Graeme and Clive, gawp at the marvels of this magical place where all are friends in monster and Star Trek costume alike. Except that no-one I’ve ever met who is into that sort of stuff would so much as bat an eyelid at such a place, let alone stand in the middle of a packed convention centre, smiling inanely as a camera circles around them to capture their panoramic delight. It’s people who don’t really know that culture who find themselves amazed by it, for better or worse, whereas those already engrossed in it can accept and enjoy it, if they’re not already wrapped in a world with friends of their own. (Much like people who used to say that Eminem was the modern Mozart were those who never really understood hip-hop before).
What seems to have been forgotten is that the audience for this film is not people who want to hear regurgitated movie lines over and over again – there’s Shrek for that – but who intricately know every nook and cranny of their chosen medium and its worlds. Writers who knew their audience wouldn’t be telegraphing story beats with such a lack of finesse (“I don’t think I have the power to revive humans, it would be really dangerous and I definitely shouldn’t try, like, ever. I might be able to though, who knows, but I doubt we’ll ever find out, hmmm.”), adhering so strictly to formula, or neglecting to create an identity for Paul‘s world in lieu of plastering together bits from those belonging to other films. Why is it assumed that an audience who can spend hours deliberating over the layout of the Starship Enterprise or scouring maps of Middle-Earth won’t care that this film’s reality barely hangs together, or that at least three quarters of the characters could be removed from the story without making the slightest bit of difference? Also, how many more times is the old ‘aging sci-fi writer with a funny name, ridiculous book titles and disdain for his fans’ cliché going to get wheeled out before someone realises that it wasn’t even vaguely amusing or credible the first time around? The authenticity on which Pegg and Frost built their substantial following is not only absent, but seems to have metamorphosed into the same contrived, misdirected commercialism that they used to rail against.
Paul isn’t really terrible, just thoroughly mediocre and misleading. Despite being advertised as a Pegg/Frost film, it’s more of a Seth Rogen film aiming for, and misunderstanding, Pegg/Frost’s audience. If you liked Superbad or enjoyed Shaun of the Dead less than your friend in the Romero t-shirt, you’ll probably find something to enjoy in Paul. If you were that friend in the Romero t-shirt (a Close Encounters t-shirt would be more appropriate in this case), you’ll probably leave at best indifferent to it, at worst mildly insulted by its lack of respect for you. I’m absolutely in the latter category and my advice is that you find a DVD of Spaced and do a marathon of that instead. It’ll give you everything you’d want from this film, but none of the disappointment you’d get, filling the time until Edgar Wright gets back for the final installment of the Three Colours Cornetto trilogy. Maybe Pegg and Frost will return as well, because there’s little sign of them here.
Overall Score: 5.00 – Bad (5s are movies that either failed at reaching the goals it set out to do, or didn’t set out to do anything special and still had many flaws. Some will enjoy 5s, but unless you’re a fan of this genre, you shouldn’t see it, and might not even want to rent it)
