Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 Blu-ray Review

     Actors: Kevin James

Format: Multiple Formats, Blu-ray, Ultraviolet, Closed-captioned, Widescreen

Language: English

Subtitles: French

Dubbed: French

Region: All Regions

Number of discs: 2

Rated: PG

Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Release Date: July 14, 2015

Digital Copy Expiration Date: December 31, 2018

 

        I liked Paul Blart: Mall Cop and I’m not ashamed to admit it. It was silly but managed to be sweet, comedically taking a Die Hard plot by inserting a rent-a-cop as the heroic protagonist. With this in mind, I don’t want to say that I had high hopes for the sequel, but certainly didn’t anticipate the quality to drop so significantly from the first film. From the beginning sequence that destroys every aspect of the happy ending we were left with at the close of the last film, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is illogical and overly silly in its desperate grab for quick laughs.

 

        Six years after saving the mall that he works at, Paul Blart (Kevin James) is beginning to think that all of his glory days are behind him. The romance from the first film falls apart, his mother is killed in an over-the-top manner, and his daughter (Raini Rodriguez) is growing up despite his overprotective nature. When he is invited to a convention for security guards in Las Vegas, it is the perfect vacation for Paul Blart and his daughter before she goes away to college. It also becomes the perfect opportunity for the mall cop to save the day once again.

 

        Coincidentally, at the same hotel that the convention is being held, there are a group of thieves stealing precious art from the walls. When Paul Blart discovers this, he and his new friends in the security business take it upon themselves to save the day. While Neal McDonough is given the thankless task of playing the generic thieving villain, there are a variety of colorful characters for the actors in the roles of the security guards. This collection of weird personas also seems to replace any effort to insert actual jokes into the screenplay, making for a lazy sense of humor which has become typical fare for a Happy Madison production.

 

        With the story taking place at the real Wynn hotel in Las Vegas, it soon feels like an advertisement wrapped in a collection of gags and cheap caricatures. Although the film is not completely void of laughs, most of the charm is gone from the original. There is something far too manufactured about this sequel to ever feel sincere, and even James has somehow lost the charm of Paul Blart’s likeable loser persona. All that is left are a series of silly slapstick gags, most of which will only make the youngest audience members laugh.

 

        The Blu-ray release includes a DVD and Digital HD copy of the film, along with the high definition presentation mastered in 4K. DVD extras include a making-of featurette and another about the cast, though a majority of the special features are exclusive to the Blu-ray disc. These extras include a handful of mostly unnecessary featurettes about various aspects of the film, but the real highlights come in the form of additional footage. The deleted scenes are as bland as the film itself, but the gag reel may have more laughs than the screenplay by Kevin James & Nick Bakay.

 

Entertainment Value: 5/10

Quality of Filmmaking: 4/10

Historical Significance:  2/10

Special Features: 6/10



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