Mall Cop 2 Movie Review

 

 

 

PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2 MOVIE REVIEW

 

The first Paul Blart: Mall Cop was pretty much Die Hard for fat guys.  I personally was a big fan of the movie.  Everything in it didn’t entirely make sense and a lot of it was far-fetched, but the movie worked.  It worked for two reasons. First, it was very creatively written.  Secondly, it worked because Paul Blart was just so darn likeable.  We wanted him to succeed at any cost and the creative way the film was written helped us suspend disbelief just enough to buy it. 

This movie starts with Paul being invited to the SOTA (Security Officers Trade Association) convention in Las Vegas.  He and his daughter check into a very fancy hotel where they soon stumble upon a plot to rob the place.  Once again, it is up to Paul to save the day. 

This movie starts off on a real bummer.  The first thing we see is how many bad things has happened to Paul since the last movie ended.  They try to make a joke out of it but it is just not funny.  I felt sorry for Paul.  That is, until I realized what a jerk he had become.  That’s right, Paul Blart comes off as a real jerk in this movie.  It’s almost like somebody else is playing the part and getting it completely wrong.  I don’t know what happened here.  He is very obnoxious, takes himself way too seriously, and constantly brags about what he did five years ago.  He is terrible to his daughter too.  We find out very early in the film that she has been accepted to UCLA but is apparently afraid to tell her dad because he is so needy and controlling.  I didn’t like this Paul Blart at all. 

While I didn’t think Kevin James was particularly good in this film, he did have a few really funny scenes toward the middle and end that showed flashes of the old Paul Blart.  There is a scene in which he is fighting with some kind of big bird that was really funny.  Another scene that really made me laugh had Paul trying to go from one skyscraper to another on a zip line, but he stopped halfway across and got stuck there.  Kevin James is always good for a few laughs, even if the performance as a whole is not that good. 

 There are a couple of really bad forced romances in the film.  Both Paul and his daughter start up a relationship with hotel employees.  In both cases, the relationship makes no sense and has no place in the movie at all.  Paul’s relationship in particular feels really awkward and seemed to exist only because it was expected to be there. 

 There is one scene in the movie that is so stupid that I just have to mention it.  At one point, two characters are being held hostage in a room in the hotel.  They are frantically trying to figure out an ingenious plan of escape.  All the while, there is a whole big glass door there that leads outside.  That’s right, I said a GLASS door.  You know, glass? That really breakable stuff?  Breaking the glass door with any number of heavy objects around the room and just walking out the huge gaping hole would have been my first plan.  I guess that was too simple for this movie. 

 The movie improves quite a bit toward the end.  We see some of that originality that worked so well in the first movie.  The end is pretty good, except for the very last scene which was spoiled by the trailer.  That scene was way overdone with CGI and looked terrible, kind of ruining the whole ending for me. 

 The ultimate failure of this movie is that the Paul Blart character is not anywhere near as likeable as he was before.  This takes the emotion out of the movie.  We don’t care what happens to him as much because we just don’t really like him anymore.  I was excited about this movie and really wanted it to deliver.  Unfortunately, it never actually gets on track.  The Movie Man gives it 2 out of 5 stars.   

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