“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?” ~ Voltaire, Candide
I guess my point is, it’s hard reviewing bad movies, but I keep going anyway. Sometimes they really do surprise you. The first Paul Blart: Mall Cop had a title that practically dared us film critics to call it the worst movie of the year. But in fact it was a silly, harmless and endearing light comedy, about the ways in which we all feel as though our potential has been squandered by circumstance, and the sense of victory that follows after we step up to a challenge and prove ourselves worthy.
Paul Blart, played by Kevin James, wasn’t a bumbling oaf. He was actually an excellent policeman who, due to his hypoglycemia, was unable to actually become one. So he took a job as a mall security guard, helping people in humdrum ways. He took that job seriously, even when nobody else would. Even his goofiness stemmed from a yearning to connect: the wife of his charming daughter abandoned them, and Paul Blart was lonely. He puffed himself up to appear more confident than he actually was. He was a likable fellow, that Blart.
But that was then, and this is now. And this is a sequel, so all the lessons hard-learned in the previous Paul Blart: Mall Cop must be unlearned in order to start afresh. Blart found love at the end of his first theatrical outing, so that love must be stripped away: his new wife leaves him after only six days of marriage, for no better reason than to take our hero down a peg. Even Blart’s mother must die, cruelly and without warning, to isolate poor Blart further, and make him into the kind of paranoid father figure who would forbid his own daughter from going to a decent college, damning her to a future not unlike his own: a non-stop doom of mediocrity.
Would that Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 could rise to that same, lofty standard: mediocrity would have been a blessing in this mostly mean-spirited retread, which revels in cheap shot jokes at Blart’s expense. The first film worked overtime to make us love, or at the very least like Paul Blart. The sequel either abuses our affections by jabbing him mercilessly, or transforming him into a figure genuinely worthy of scorn.
He must of course lift himself from this new, gross status quo. Fortunately for Blart, there is a new call to action: a villain with no motivation whatsoever (Neal McDonough) is stealing priceless works of art from the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, where Blart and his daughter (Raini Rodriguez) are attending a security conference. Once again Blart is more can capable of saving the day, but Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 spends so much time tearing him down that there just isn’t enough movie left to build him back up again.
Not that any of this would matter (well, much) if Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 was funny. But it’s not funny, even compared to the original, which itself was only worth the occasional giggle. What few jokes elicited an actual laugh are so cheap, you could probably buy them for less than the ticket price. Punching an innocent old lady in the stomach elicits more chuckles than any other gag in the film, as grotesque as it is. The follow-up joke, that she’s very polite about it, should have been the funnier part, but the viciousness that precedes her apology for surprising Blart overwhelms that scene, just as the viciousness that precedes the heist plot overwhelms any pleasure we could gain from watching Kevin James take out armed thugs with a glue gun.
Films like Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 make it hard to remain optimistic about movies that look as bad, on the surface, as Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. It takes a decent foundation – a character that’s sympathetic yet ripe for comic potential – and erects nothing on top of it. Again, it’s too busy tearing him down to build anything new. A sequel has a responsibility to cultivate its garden. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 never gets further than the fertilizer.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
