I loved Hot Fuzz, it’s one of my favourite comedies out there, so Paul was always going to have very large shoes to fill. I wasn’t a huge fan of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz was a huge improvement so I was interested to see what direction they were going to take with this new one.
The thing to take into consideration is that Paul has been written totally by Pegg and Frost. No Edgar Wright this time, and the movie feels different for it, in a good way and a bad way. Edgar Wright was by no means a form shackles, but in this Pegg and Frost are seen in their purest from, no distillery or extra ingredients. Just the two of them, and my goodness you can tell they’re hardcore sci-fi junkies. However, the film does suffer from the distinct lack of Edgar.
Paul is full to the brim with references whether it be big obvious ones like Star Trek or the lesser known ones like Lorenzo’s Oil. I didn’t get them all, there are probably loads in there that I missed or didn’t even notice. I think my favourite of them all would be Jason Bateman’s line upon shooting his CB radio: “boring conversation anyway.”
It has a similar vibe to it as Shaun of the Dead in that Graeme and Clive, played by Pegg and Frost respectively, are already best mates to begin with. However in Paul they’re complete and total geeks, seriously the only thing missing in the stereotype is acne and thick rimmed glasses. So yeah, if I had to describe the characters I’d say they’re a bit of a mix of the duo from Shaun of the Dead and Spaced, an old TV sit-com on Channel 4 that was also directed by Edgar Wright.
The movie isn’t really that funny though until Paul comes into it. It’s just har har aren’t British people silly or har har aren’t geeks funny, you get the idea. It’s just point and laugh humour really until our little alien buddy, voiced by Seth Rogen, comes into it. Then it gets going.
And so do my spoilers.
Paul is a being of what seems to be infinite knowledge, well not quite infinite but his knowledge of the universe is extensive. On top of this he enjoys the simple pleasures of booze, smokes and general larking about. Luckily though he’s likeable, his character is well done. The pair meet Paul in the middle of the desert, Clive faints so it’s up to Graeme to help the extra terrestrial. Graeme and Paul create an instant rapport and Clive becomes jealous of this creating tension between the three, which can only be a good thing in terms of the laughs.
Paul is on the run from the government I think, I say I think because I really don’t know who it is who’s actually chasing him down. All we know is they want to find him and kill him so they can experiment with his brain. Paul needs to get to a specific point, set off fireworks to signal to his alien buddies to come pick him up. He apparently has someone on the inside, who is helping him escape.
Jason Bateman plays Zoil, the man in black sent by his boss the ‘big guy’ to capture Paul, and along the way he receives two more henchmen to aid his cause. The two little helpers suck. I did not like them at all. They’re played by Bill Hader (Seth Rogan’s partner in Superbad) and the bloke who presents the medium-wave radio show in Hot Rod. These two are here for the goofy humour. The two detectives or whatever, again it isn’t really explained who these two are, who are inept at their job, which is fair enough, but they are just TOO stupid. It’s been done so many different times, you know, two inept figures of authority, one is the obvious idiot while the other pretends to be the smart leader and as it turns out they’re both idiots. Sigh. It doesn’t work, you can’t be this bad at your job! The humour from these two is so poor, but luckily they’re hardly major characters so it doesn’t effect the movie too badly.
Another thing I didn’t particularly like in this movie was the almost obsessive Christian bashing in it. My God, it’s flogged to death. Along the way they pick up the love interest of the movie (Graeme’s, unlucky Nicholas) and she’s a walking stereotype of the ‘extreme Christian’ to the point where she is actually wearing a t-shirt picturing Jesus shooting Darwin in the head. If they had just left it at that I wouldn’t have minded, but they don’t, it’s brought up and bashed all the way through the movie, and it just feels so needless.
After this scene we get this running joke of Ruth, freshly liberated, over-cursing. All her lines from now on involve cursing of some kind, and it does get a bit annoying as the film goes on. There are a few nit-picking gripes to be had too, such as why Zoil is using a CB radio to talk to the ‘big guy’, surely the government would have better and more secure equipment than this. It’s there so people can listen in to their conversations that’s all. Another part that I find funny is the ‘loony father’ who somehow manages to get ahead of them at every stop! He actually gets arrested at one stop, hauled into a police car and STILL manages to beat them to the next town! And they say God’s not real, pah!
On the positive side though, there are a lot of laughs to be had. Many of them originate from Paul, who’s genuinely funny and also brings Graeme and Clive’s humour out too. Without Paul in the scene this movie feels flat. So thank God he’s in it frequently. Well it is called Paul after all. I think my favourite line from him is the one when he sits smoking around the camp fire, claiming the stuff he’s smoking killed Dylan. Graeme corrects him: “Bob Dylan’s not dead” to which Paul retorts: “isn’t he?” Genius.
The twist at the end is also quite good, we finally get to find out who the ‘big guy’ is. It’s Sigourney Weaver! A coup for the movie to have her playing the baddie, she arrives just in time for an Alien reference. Well it would be rude not to. So Weaver is the bad guy and Paul’s man on the inside, is actually Zoil, first name Lorenzo, get it? Anyway, I thought this twist was quite good, as I was guessing the inside man throughout the film and for some reason I didn’t think it’d be Zoil. I fully thought it was the young girl from the beginning until they meet up with her later in the film. I’m glad Bateman wasn’t the baddie, he’s too much of a good guy, and he’s about as menacing as a kitten trapped in a hammock.
This movie does feel a bit more mainstream than Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, which does remove some of the magic unfortunately. It’s a bit more Americanised now, it’s American actors all the way as oppose to the Brits found in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. No Timothy Dalton or Dylan Moran here I’m afraid, but hey it’s set in the States what did you expect? It’s not that the American’s are bad actors, far from it, it just looses its charm a little. Rather than jokes about model villages we get ones about aliens and Mexican bell-boys.
The references do make this movie worth while though. It wouldn’t feel right without them. They don’t have as much impact as the likes of Hot Fuzz though. There’s no equivalent to the riding into the village armed to the teeth on a horse scene for example; the references are mainly homage to movies rather than to the genre itself.
Overall, Paul is a fun film that deserves a watch. It’s not as good as Hot Fuzz but it’s still a funny film. It’s not laugh-a-minute stuff, and the jokes are fairly predictable but there are plenty of them in there to be had and if you’re a sci-fi enthusiast then you’ll love it even more. Giving it an overall score is quite difficult as it’s solid four star stuff throughout most of it. But there are a few gripes that I’ve mentioned (the bumbling idiots, relentless Christian bashing, loss of charm, lack of any explanation et al) that just hold it back a little. I think it’s because it’s aimed at a different market. With the success of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz a lot of attention was on this film and so it became more mainstream so as to relate to its now broader (and more American) audience.
Final verdict: 3 Stars. A must for science fiction nerds.
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