“How dare you look down on us!”
On paper this is my favourite film of the year.
On paper this slots immediately into my DVD collection – the inevitable Special Edition of course!
Paul stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, stars of the iconic (to me at least) Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. It was written by them too!
Directed by Greg Mottola, who made the excellent Superbad and the under-rated and under-appreciated (and surprisingly mature) Adventureland.
Bill Hader has a key supporting role – the best kind of role for him – (he isn’t a lead man).
It’s about two t-shirt wearing nerds who find a talking alien (voiced by Seth Rogen).
The alien is named ‘Paul”!!!!
Instant classic right? Straight into the ‘already in development’ Pegg/Frost DVD triolgy with SotD and Hot Fuzz right?
Right?
Anybody?
But Paul is made on film. In retrospect that’s not such a good thing.
Date night.
Pegg and Frost are Graeme and Clive respectively. Clive is a well known science-fiction author and Graeme an illustrator/cartoonist (not sure what he prefers to be labelled).
The long time friends are in the United States for the first time for Comic-Con – basically a huge nerd ‘love-in’ that caters to the obscure and anti-mainstream (that’s not a diss by the way I’d love to go to one. But it is a nerd love-in). After the convention the two wide eyed and excited British lads have planned a self driven tour of supposed UFO locations and places of interest. It is during this tour that they witness a car accident and upon arriving at the wreckage they find the driver is none other than… Paul.
Paul looks pretty much exactly like every artist’s impression of an alien over the last 50 years – but he wears shorts – this is deliberate by the way, so that the world is ready for the arrival if it ever occurs. In fact Paul has been busy since his arrival in Roswell last century as an expert UFO consultant/adviser to the media and Hollywood (you can thank him for ET).
But Paul was driving erratically for a reason, the authorities are on his trail, and he tells the astonished lads that they must help him flee not the country, but the planet.
And so Clive, Graeme and Paul head off in the rented RV across country, pausing only briefly to pick up/abduct (your call) a deeply religious – and all that entails – young woman named Ruth Buggs (Kristen Wiig) from a caravan park, with the authorities including Jason Bateman and Bill Hader in hot pursuit.
Should be awesome right? Well here are the ‘jokes’:
– Everyone thinks Clive and Graeme are gay instead of good buddies.
– The religious Ruth has her whole belief system turned upside down upon meeting Paul, and has no option (apparently) to immediately discard her upbringing for swearing and acts of fornication.
– Paul uses drugs, is crude and willing to expose himself for cheap laughs.
– Bateman is a determined professional, but his colleagues are idiots.
– Ummm, Graeme and Clive speak Klingon to each other a few times?
Seriously that’s about it. If Paul wasn’t an alien this would be Road Trip or a similar moronic teen comedy, albeit with marginally more likable and identifiable characters.
And I mean marginally.
What remains is a series of dick and gay jokes, some drug use and the humour that arises when reserved and unexpected characters swear and make constantly crude references. Actually this is the kind of film I hate, it’s lazy, formulaic and just plain not funny, and even if it is slightly better because Pegg and Frost are in it and share an effortless chemistry, by comparison with Hot Fuzz and Shaun I do hate Paul.
Final Rating – 6 / 10. It isn’t all-time terrible, but by comparison it is awful.
