Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
This is going to be a brief review, because I don’t really have much to say about this sequel to the harmless 2009 hit with Kevin James as an affable security guard who got to actually be a police-level hero when people tried to rob the mall he worked at. I didn’t have much to say about that film, either, but I have more to say about the just-released sequel, which puts Blart in Las Vegas for a security guard expo where he hopes to get some recognition for what he did in the first film. Spoiler alert: he finds himself in the middle of a robbery situation again, and of course, he saves the day, though he has some unlikely help in that front. Where the first film had a slight, harmless charm to it, this film just doesn’t work. Putting aside, for a moment, that the film has next to zero genuine laughs in it, the script by James and Nick Bakay portrays Blart as a self-centered jerk rather than the everyman hero he was in the first film. His wife left him after six days of marriage, and his mother died, leaving him alone with his daughter (Raini Rodriguez), and we see that he has a difficult time dealing with each change, with the big test being his daughter possibly going to UCLA for college. None of these are really excuses for Blart being written the way he is in this film, and it makes it almost impossible for us to watch the movie with the same underdog enjoyment the first one was greeted with. There is one moment in the movie that I did laugh uncontrollable in, but it wasn’t so much because Blart was getting beaten up by a peacock in the hotel’s “Garden of Contemplation,” but the piano player’s complete indifference to Blart’s plight. It’s one of those things a viewer latches on to, even if the rest of the movie is pointless, unmemorable and annoying. The movie, as a whole, is all three of those things, but that scene? One I will cherish for having scene for, maybe not years, but at least the months to come.
