PAUL

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Starring Simon Pegg & Nick Frost

Trailer

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Forget Blue Valentine: there’s a far more heart-rending break-up currently tearing through reality, causing aficionados of late-night early 2000s Channel 4 comedy to jump off buildings and cry into their Wrightinis. All six of them. The mums and dads of Spaced have run off to Hollywood on separate planes, and some of them have crashed on landing; Edgar Wright’s courted genius with Scott Pilgrim, creating possibly the best film ever with just a bunch of unknowns, some big cartoon words and a vat of caffeine. Simon Pegg has… well. This.

Paul is an odd one. For most of its run time it cruises along on happy memories of that fictional flat, with Pegg and Frost playing themselves and generally bumbling along and bumping into things. It’s a dimwitted Yankee cousin of the expert Brit pastiches they produced back home, not without its charms but stuffed full of swearing and playground jokes, like the pair have been growing backwards. Wright’s jitter cam is replaced by loving Spielberg tributes, every comedy actor the two have ever watched stoned turns up in diminishing cameos, it’s all… normal. Normal jokes, normal acting, normal CGI. Slightly boring, but loveable. Whereas Scott Pilgrim repeatedly punches you in the face, climbs up the walls and gives you a cartoon-shag-heart-attack. It’s almost soul-crippling to know that most audiences will prefer a couple of chuckles at joint jokes and the warm sedate knowledge of simply knowing who Pegg and Frost are. Oooh, I like them, let’s go see that………………zzzzzzzzzzzzz WhuHaadflk? Oh, good job to Seth Rogen though. He’s the most competent he’s ever been when you can’t see his bloated, stubbled mess of a stupid face.