Paul

What happens when geeks make a movie for geeks? It's should have everything a geek would want. And when it comes to Greg Mottola's Paul, it does have a lot of geekery in it. Written by and starring geek gods Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, Paul is a road trip comedy, that pays tribute to almost everything that geeks hold dear. There's references to Star Trek, Star Wars, Steven Spielberg and a lot of other things that don't start with the letter S.

Pegg and Frost star as two English guys, who are visiting the US for the San Diego Comic Con and then go on a road trip to see all the famous UFO sites in the country. Not too much later, they end up meeting Paul(voiced by Seth Rogen), an alien who has escaped captivity after 60 years and now wants to go home. The guys agree to help Paul and end up being chased by the FBI, rednecks and a weird religious guy.

The movie has a lot of credit to it. Pegg and Frost are familiar for having done Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Greg Mottola struck it big with Superbad and Seth Rogen voicing Paul was a perfect fit for the character. Adding to that, some of the funniest comedians currently working, Kristen Wiig, Jason Bateman, Bill Hader et al. Sounds like the makings of a very funny movie, right?

Wrong. Well, mostly wrong anyway. There's a lot of things going for the movie. Main one of these is Paul himself. Arguably the best CGI character since Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean, Paul is not a particularly fresh take on aliens, but a very fun one. Which is good, because there's not a lot to the main characters. Neither Pegg or Frost have much to do in the movie and even during the climax of the movie, they're handing the fight to the supporting actors.

Which is where the movie shines the most. Wiig, Bateman and friends bring their best to their roles. To be fair, the supporting characters are written better than the leads, especially Wiig's character, who actually has something resembling a story arc. Bateman does his FBI agent role very well and enjoys playing something a bit against his typical role.

The main problem of the movie is that it's so much geared towards the geek community. It feels like Pegg and Frost took a bunch of classic sci-fi movie lines and built a movie around them. This comes off the most at the last half an hour of the movie, which seems to be littered with said lines. What's more, they don't do anything new with them, they just use the lines as they are and expect people to laugh just for recognizing the line.

Another problem is the tone of the movie. Going from a heartfelt scene to the easy swearing and piss jokes is kind of jarring. It feels the movie has an identity crisis at times due to this. But I have to say, the swearing in this movie is the most colourful I've heard in a while.

There's a classic alien comedy buried somewhere in Paul. It's too bad the script seems to have every idea Pegg and Frost came up thrown in there and the movie itself gets buried after tons of geek references. Added to this very lackluster main characters, and your movie is in trouble. Luckily Paul and the supporting characters save the movie somewhat and make the movie watchable. My rating for Paul: 5/10