Review – Paul Blart, Mall Cop

In the immortal words of Dean Wormer, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” Sitcom veteran Kevin James plays – surprise surprise – an overweight loser working as a security guard in a shopping mall. When robbers on skateboards and those annoying too-small bikes besiege the place, poor lovelorn Blart is the only one who can foil their evil scheme. At first I thought (hoped) that this might turn out to be a snarky satire of the Die Hard idea that an untrained, talentless slob could be an action hero. But I kept a close eye on my irony detector the whole time, and the needle never so much as twitched. This movie grossed more than $100 million in initial release and topped the box office charts for weeks, which should tell you a lot about the state of popular culture in America. Wish I’d skipped it