Every couple of months or so, my husband and I play a game called Movie Heaven & Movie Hell- in which we each pick 7 movies we’d love to watch, and 7 films we think will be terrible, then flip a coin to decide which one we’re watching. Yesterday, it was between my ‘Heaven’ choice of Fanboys and his ‘Hell’ choice of Paul.
Tonight’s Heaven & Hell were both comedy road trips featuring Colin & I’s native people: nerds. Colin’s choice of Paul as a ‘Hell’ raised some eyebrows, as it’s written by and starring two Geek Gods, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Similarly, opinions amongst friends were divided over Fanboys as a ‘Heaven‘ film. On the one hand, @alessadark both enjoyed and recommended it, whereas @davefens said he wanted to punch absolutely everyone in it in the face. As it happens, we were unlucky on the coin toss again and ended up watching Paul…
Clive (Frost) and Graeme (Pegg) play two English sci-fi nerds who are painfully unfuckable, looking as they do like an Arctic Monkeys roadie and a grubby version of Flash from Blackadder Goes Forth. Pretty much everyone who encounters them think they’re gay lovers (rofl! gays!) but they don’t give a shit because they’ve made a trip of a lifetime to Comic Con in San Diego- the nerd Mecca.
After the Con, they decide to hire an RV for a road trip to prominent UFO hotspots in America. It’s on this voyage of discovery that they encounter Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen)- an alien who’s escaped from the Government and desperate to get back to his home planet. Being nice lads, Graeme and Clive agree to ferry Paul to his rendezvous point. En route, they kidnap Ruth (Kristen Wiig), a fundamentalist Christian with a gammy eye, and are pursued by both the FBI and Ruth’s hyuck-hyuck yokel dad.
Now, before I commence criticism, here’s a summary of why we weren’t relishing this movie despite it’s Pegg/Frost pedigree:
a) I’ve never seen nor particularly care about ET or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which Paul is a love letter to (indeed, Spielberg makes a brief vocal cameo). If that makes me a bad person, mascara my top lip and call me Hitler.
b) The trailer made it look shit. Sorry.
c) It features a wise-cracking, American-accented alien. ALF with big swears.
d) The aforementioned wise-cracking alien smokes weed. I KNOW this is a gag about those awful posters beloved by idiot potheads, but I don’t find the concept funny. So sue me.
Available at Easyart.com, if you happen to be a fucking dick.
So there’s our prejudices laid on the line, but knowing this was Pegg and Frost, we were feeling fairly open minded about Paul and were fully prepared to let it surprise us and surpass our low expectations.
Paul did, indeed, have its strengths, most obviously in its cast. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are great together and it’s always nice to see them perform as a double-act, but Paul also featured a smorgasbord of American comedy royalty in its cameos and supporting roles- Wiig and Rogen, of course, but also Arrested Development‘s Jason Bateman and Jeffrey Tambor, and Glee/Best In Show‘s Jane Lynch. There’s also a brief cameo from Sigourney Weaver, the undisputed queen of sci-fi, who didn’t have a lot to do but looked smashing.
Another point of praise is for the CGI, motion capture and vocal performance used to bring Paul to life. All three were excellent. I’m not a big Seth Rogen fan but he deserves kudos for this- he made Paul likeable as opposed to wacky or an overt smart-arse. This was a big deal for me, as I was expecting something more akin to Roger Rabbit with the character, and it was lovely that Paul didn’t once make my shit itch.
However, the film did have an awful lot of flaws, that, although we tried hard, meant we didn’t enjoy it that much.
For a start, and most importantly, it wasn’t that funny. Whereas Hot Fuzz cleverly twisted and subverted the buddy-cop movie to brilliant comedic effect, Paul relies on a bunch of dick jokes, obvious references that could have come straight out of Family Guy (oh look, a band in a hillbilly bar are playing the Star Wars Cantina Song, how droll) and silly swearing. Another hindrance was that Paul felt and looked like it should be a family movie, thanks to the simple story, child-like heroes, and cute CGI alien. As a result of this, the swearing and drug use really jarred. Maybe that was the point, but for me, it didn’t work- it was too childish to be an adult comedy and too rude for kids.
The epic amount of creative swearing originates from a scene where Ruth freaks out at the concept of worlds beyond our own and argues with Paul about creationism versus evolution. The row swiftly ends when Paul uses telepathy to share his knowledge of the galaxy. After seeing that maybe the universe does indeed go beyond a literal interpretation of the Bible, Ruth realises she can sin and fornicate and curse all she cocking well wants!
Which, ya know, is nice and all, but it would have been better character development for her to have come to this conclusion on her own once her hysteria wore off (she was talking to a bona fide alien, after all).
Now, if the scene was just there facilitate a character to use lots and lots of combinations of swearwords at comedically inappropriate times, why not make Wiig’s character foul-mouthed from the second we meet her? It woulda been funnier- just look at Malcolm Tucker. And if the scene was there to make some kind of mildly controversial point about the belief in intelligent design, then I don’t think an untaxing sci-fi comedy is the right platform for it- mainly because the subject is a fucking COMEDY GOLDMINE that should be plundered for gags in a movie entirely devoted to it.
In conclusion, Paul definitely wasn’t an awful film, but it also wasn’t up to Pegg and Frost’s usual standards, with few laugh out loud moments.
Come on guys, we know you’re better than this! Although Paul occasionally raised a couple of wan smiles on our dour faces, I think the humour was a too ‘zany’, but when I say ‘zany’ I actually mean ‘studenty’ but I’m TRYING to be nice because, GODS DAMN IT, I like Pegg and Frost.
I wasn’t going to give a numerical score this time as Colin declared that practice as wack, yo. But he’s my husband, so I’m contractually and sacredly obliged not to listen to him, so here we go:
Plot: 7/10
Acting: 6/10
Script: 5/10
Direction: 5/10
Action/ special effects: 7/10
Does it pass the Bechdel test (i.e. does the film feature more than one female character, do they talk to each other and is the conversation about something other than a man)?:
Nope. Ruth is the only female character with a lot of screen time and she doesn’t talk to any other women. Definite fail.
On the next Heaven & Hell- we review a horror movie, but which will it be- the new Fright Night, or Human Centipede? Find out tomorrow!
