Slam one down on the bar, scoop in some crushed ice and finish with a slug of grenadine. Paul is straight from the cocktail school of cinema. Which is to say, it contains a handful of familiar ingredients — the buddy movie, the road movie, Star Trek, stoner gags, granite-jawed FBI agents — all swept into the blender and spun, shaken and stirred into something that, in the end, turns out quite differently. Even by the brash standards of other sci-fi comedies, from Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953) to Galaxy Quest (1999), this film has chutzpah, delirious chutzpah.
Most of that chutzpah, and a good slice of the deliriousness, comes from the central pairing of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost — Paul’s leading actors, as well as its authors. Here, they transplant the endearing double act that they forged in the Channel 4 series Spaced (1999–2001), and tempered in Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), to American soil. So there they are, two British nerds, plotting a course through a comic-book convention to all the UFO sites scattered across the southern states. It is somewhere around Roswell, New Mexico, that they meet good ol’ eponymous Paul.
It says something that Paul — voiced by American funny man Seth Rogen — astonishes more for his personality than for the fact that he is entirely computer-generated. This is an alien who is in equal parts photo- realistic and cartoonish; whose iridescent eyes crease and twitch even as he sucks on a joint or extends a middle finger to his new friends. He’s like Bugs Bunny, only with a more wicked vocabulary. And if that sounds like a churlish use of special effects, it is also an effective one. The film buzzes along when Paul is on the screen. How fortunate that Pegg and Frost spend the rest of the film delivering him (part of the way) home.
So, we have a central plot — and an engaging one it is, too. But many of Paul’s joys lie more towards the margins. The supporting cast is electric: Jason Bateman, Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio as persistent federal agents; Kristen Wiig as a kooky trailer-park gal along for the ride; and the Queen of All Sci-Fi, Sigourney Weaver, as an icy off-screen voice. And then there are the gags, of both the verbal and sight varieties. Among my favourites is Pegg ripping an ‘Alien on board’ bumper sticker from his motor home — as soon as he does actually have an alien on board.
Paul does misstep occasionally, though. Some of the humour feels a little too easy and cheap, as when the two leads trudge through a ‘we’re not gay, really’ routine in a hotel room. Then there are the cracks about creationism that jar less because they are slightly cruel than because they have been made a hundred times before, in a hundred lesser movies. Yet it is hard to hold any of that against a film that surprises, so consistently and so confidently, elsewhere — whether in the outta-nowhere violence of its final act, or in the tenderness that underpins it all. Besides, there’s a cameo by Steven Spielberg that does a lot to raise the bar for cameos in general.
Credit, too, to director Greg Mottola for marshalling all of Paul’s madcap strands into a coherent whole. The ingredients could have sprayed everywhere, and yet they don’t. Instead, he delivers a film that combines the swaggering audacity of his earlier Superbad (2007) with the kaleidoscopic gentleness of — and this is one that really deserves a slot on your DVD shelf — Adventureland (2009). There is even, it must be said, a dash of Spielbergian grandeur in the mix. Although its titular character has been brought down to earth in several respects, Paul retains the sense of wonder that we associate with the ’Berg’s science-fiction films.
Aptly enough, the next Pegg and Frost double act will be as the Thompson twins in Spielberg’s Tintin adaptation — a very different type of pop culture for them to roam across. In the meantime, this, their space odyssey, will do nicely.
Deborah Ross returns next week.
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