Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 starts out by reversing much of the happy ending of the first movie. Paul Blart (Kevin James) did end up getting the girl, but she divorces him six days after the wedding. Then, his mother is run over in the street in a bizarre scene that is presumably intended to get laughs, even though it involves a helpless woman dying in a senseless manner. This sequel doesn’t want to do the work of finding the next logical step for the character, and instead presses the reset button, robbing him of almost all the progress he made in the previous installment of the film.
The plot then takes Blart to Las Vegas, where he is set to attend a big security guard convention. With him is his daughter Maya (Raini Rodriguez), who is nervous about telling the overprotective Blart that she’s been accepted into UCLA. While Blart bumbles around the convention and generally makes a fool of himself, Maya enjoys the attention of a newly made friend. Meanwhile, a gang of thieves is preparing to pull an elaborate heist at the hotel where Blart and his daughter are staying. Blart stumbles into the plot and uses all his security knowhow to take on the thieves.
Blart spends the first half of the film being pretty obnoxious to everyone he meets. This is presumably meant to be funny, but it isn’t. The only thing it accomplishes is turning the lead character into an unsympathetic jerk. Paul Blart is an unreasonable human being, incapable of hearing what other people are saying. He insists, for example, that the hotel manager has a crush on him, in spite of her repeatedly saying that she doesn’t. The “joke” is that his insistence actually ends up making her fall in love with him. It is not very funny, and the film basically makes it out that Blart’s awful behavior is somehow correct.
The film plods along at a terribly slow place before having Blart’s daughter stumble on to the art heist. She ends up in the clutches of the bad guys, and Blart has to get serious and save the day. By this time, the film has so invested in the awfulness of the main character that it’s tough to root for him to get the bad guys. The villains of the piece never really feel dangerous. They mostly make empty threats, ignoring all logic as they bend over backwards to give Blart opportunities to save the day.
That’s really just a long way of saying that the writing is lazy. The entire movie is built on a series of contrivances, artificially moving the characters from one poorly constructed story point to the next. The production is equally lazy. Las Vegas is a visual wonderland, but one wouldn’t know it from this film. It makes Vegas look really drab and colorless. The direction does the comedy no favors. Kevin James doesn’t even look happy to be in this role again. The actor delivers a performance that feels contractually obligated, barreling through the role with little gusto.
Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is worse than the first movie, which is actually kind of an amazing feat. It somehow exhibits even less interest in being anywhere near decent. In moments, it feels like the film actively hates its audience, delivering scenes that border on reprehensible. There is a scene, for example, where Paul Blart attempts to convince a woman that she actually does want to entertain the drunken advances of one of Blart’s colleagues. In the film’s twisted logic, this is supposed to make Blart a good guy. But in the real world, this is a real creep move. But the film just doesn’t care. It hates you. It hates us all.
My Rating:
