It’s like Live Free or Die Hard… but in a building.
Wait, that’s not quite right, but it’s not too far off either. It would be more accurate to describe Paul Blart: Mall Cop as Die Hard, but played for laughs.
The film, directed by Steve Carr (Daddy Day Care), was the first 2009 release to cross the 100 million dollar mark and stars Kevin James as Blart, a security guard at the local mall. Though Blart has ambitions to be a New Jersey State Trooper, they are constantly foiled for one reason or another – most recently due to his hypoglycemia. Blart is forced to content himself with his dead-end, no respect position. However, when Blart’s mall 
comes under attack by a bunch of X-Games-type thieves (some of the actors apparently did participate in said games), it falls to the Segway-driving, down on his luck, guard to save the day.
Oh yes, there’s also a girl – Amy (Jayma Mays). If Amy didn’t work at the fake hair weave kiosk called Unbeweavable at the mall she would be completely out of Blart’s league and probably is anyway. However, that doesn’t stop Blart from pursuing her in his own haphazard way, and because it’s a movie, it doesn’t stop her from being interested. Also, because it’s a movie, she ends up as one of the hostages when the bad guys start their heist.
If the plot sounds uninspired you should hear the jokes.
Yes, they fall just as flat as that one. And, just like that one they all have an outside shot at making you smile, but an equally good shot at making you wince.
James is clearly a capable, funny comedian (and has both a producer and writer credit on the movie), but that doesn’t come across here. Much of the comedy is found in Blart’s inadequacies, and in displaying them he becomes all too annoying. The character doesn’t convey the likability that Peter Sellers gave his ultimate blundering detective – Jacques Clouseau. One feels bad for Blart and one feels bad laughing at him, it was always easy to laugh at Clouseau; Blart is just a sad sack of a human being.
It’s not a problem that he is going to save the day – he is, after all, the hero of the film – but it would have been nice to see Blart take on a halfway decent gang. As it stands, the bad guys in the fil
m are in no way developed and one can’t quite imagine why the “brains” behind the operation, Veck Sims (Keir O’Donnell), possibly thought he had a winning scheme or group of people to carry it out with.
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