Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 Review Roundup: Critics Dish Out So Much Shade About Kevin James Comedy Sequel

Paul Blart, Mall Cop may want to ditch the Segway and retire

By Corinne Heller Apr 16, 2015 5:17 PMTags

Paul Blart, Mall Cop may want to ditch the Segway and retire.

Kevin James reprises his title role in Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, the sequel to the hit 2009 comedy, which hits theaters on Friday. In the new film, his character heads to Las Vegas to attend a Security Guard Expo with his teenage daughter, played by Raini Rodriguez.

He discovers a heist plot. Neal McDonough plays top baddie Vincent. Naturally, hijinks ensue.

Most movie critics seem largely unimpressed. And there aren't that many reviews online as of yet in general. According to The Kansas City Star, there were no advanced screenings of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 for most critics.

Check out what five of them said:

1. The U.K. newspaper The Telegraph's Robbie Collin gives Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 two out of five stars and calls the PG comedy "forgettable slapstick."

"Kevin James trundles through a series of computer-generated scrapes in this largely pointless sequel," he writes. "It's not that the film is particularly loathsome, or that Blart is an overweeningly horrible character. What rankles is that he's barely anything at all; a stereotype of a stereotype; a half-remembered punchline; a stomach with a moustache and wheels. As you watch the film, it's already forgotten."

2. Den of Geek's Mark Harrison also gives the film one out of five stars and says, "there's nothing—nothing, nothing, nothing— here to make anyone think about a Paul Blart 3."

"Aside from all the 'fat man fall down' jokes that persist throughout James' filmography, the sequel also reprises the previous film's flattest running joke, about Blart's hypoglycemia," he writes.

"It gets to where you easily forget that Neal McDonough is in this, except for when he does show up with his phoned-in mania," he adds. "A patchy, obviously improv-ed skit with Blart and Vincent arguing about who's crazier is the closest that the film gets to raising a titter."

3. TimeOut London's Tom Huddleston gives Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 one out of five stars.

"Given that it comes courtesy of Adam Sandler's production company Happy Madison—the good folks behind such comedy classics as You Don't Mess With the Zohan and Grown Ups 2—it's no surprise that ‘Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2' is a lazy, witless, laugh-free experience. But even by their standards, this is a slog to sit through, so glacially paced that at times it achieves an almost zen-like level of anti-comedy."

4. The Irish TimesDonald Clarke says the movie is "so mordantly witless that it has the quality of a bleak art-house tragedy."

"If the filmmakers had deliberately set out to squander the sliver of good will established by the first film—which really wasn't that bad—they could hardly have produced something more consistently unappealing," he writes.

5. The U.K. website Little White LiesDavid Jenkins gives a brutal non-review of the film. Things get pretty ugly. Okay, uglier.

He lists "20 things that aren't quite as bad as Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2.

Among them: "Twin hangnails," "Biting into a piece of fruit you discover to be rotten, then realize you're too hungry to care so swallow the spoiled produce" and "When a family pet accidentally swallows a lighter."