“Help someone today,” Paul Blart urges his keynote listeners with any luck, he’ll take his own advice and keep us from having to see him in a movie ever again.
There are surely better uses of this actor’s gut, grin and Everyman appeal than the scene in which he has to lie down underneath a girl’s dripping ice-cream cone, or the one where he’s forced to hurl himself down a flight of stairs while encased in bulletproof luggage. But James - an inherently likable screen presence who, even without the “Paul Blart” movies, would have far too much Adam Sandler-produced crap on his resume (“Zookeeper,” “Grown Ups,” “Grown Ups 2”) - deserves a much better signature role than the one he’s written for himself. James and Rodriguez have an appreciably sweet father-daughter rapport, and the drama of whether or not Maya should go to UCLA (which is basically held up here as the Wynn Las Vegas & Encore Resort of universities) helps tether the movie to a somewhat recognizable reality. Inevitably, perhaps, there comes the moment when Steve Wynn himself makes a pointless cameo (by all appearances, having just emerged from his tanning bed), though not necessarily more pointless than the moment when Paul finds himself in the same elevator with Mini Kiss. It’s the one mildly amusing scene in the script (penned by returning scribes James and Nick Bakay), which has been directed with bumbling anonymity by Andy Fickman (taking over for the original’s Steve Carr), and lensed with seemingly no coherent visual ideas beyond “Get the Wynn Las Vegas & Encore Resort in the background as much as possible,” even if it requires that a simple poolside conversation be shot with a wide-angle lens. Soon Paul will have to call on his sad-sack security-guard brethren (they include Loni Love, Gary Valentine and Shelly Desai) for backup, forming a sort of sub-Avengers league with Tasers and other non-lethal weapons.īy a chance turn of events, Paul winds up giving the trade convention’s keynote speech, allowing him to hold forth on the daily indignities and fleeting rewards of being a security guard. And while you’re there, you really might as well also go and check out that multimillion-dollar aquatic theater piece “Le Reve,” a performance of which Paul naturally has to disrupt while being chased by one of Vincent’s gun-toting, aim-challenged goons. No such luck, of course: The real reason he’s been invited is so that he can be repeatedly humiliated, slighted, knocked over, attacked by exotic birds, and occasionally, unintentionally flirted with (by a game Daniella Alonso), all while wearing a succession of hideous, tropical-colored polyester shirts.Įvincing all the freshness and imagination of its title, “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2” sets our roly-poly hero on a collision course with a sneering thief named Vincent (Neal McDonough in his umpteenth stock-villain role), who’s trying to divest the Wynn Las Vegas & Encore Resort of its priceless art collection - which you could see firsthand, of course, if you were to pay the Wynn Las Vegas & Encore Resort a visit. On the same day Maya gets her good news, Paul receives an invitation to attend a security officers’ trade convention in Vegas - or, more precisely, at the Wynn Las Vegas & Encore Resort - and decides to attend, thinking he might finally be recognized for the daring Black Friday rescue operation he pulled off back in ’09. So much for the women in Paul’s life, with the exception of his loyal teenage daughter, Maya (Raini Rodriguez), who can’t quite bring herself to tell him that she’s been admitted to UCLA, which is a long way from Jersey.