Unashamedly Funny

A few weeks ago, an unheralded movie called Paul Blart: Mall Cop shocked Hollywood by earning nearly $33.8 million in its opening weekend. Paul Blart then continued to shock Hollywood by holding strong in its second and third weekends rather than dropping off precipitously, which is usually what happens when a bad movie opens big and the people who went to see it tell their friends to avoid it like the plague.

As of this writing, Paul Blart has earned $100 million against a production cost of $26 million, and will probably top out around $120 million. While American comedies often do poorly overseas, the broad nature of Paul Blart means it might make a lot of money abroad. If so, it will end up a phenomenally profitable piece of work.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Variety, which still considers itself the show-business bible even though by now it is more like the show-business Dianetics, called Paul Blart “an almost shockingly amateurish one-note-joke.” It was little advertised. Its own distributor hoped it might earn maybe half of what it made in its first few days. As a result, the term “blarted” is now being bandied about to describe the effect of a terrible movie that crowds out more deserving fare, as in “you’ve been blarted.”

Very funny. Only here’s the thing: So is Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Well, maybe not very funny, but pretty funny, with a really winning performance by Kevin James in the title role. James, who starred in an intermittently engaging sitcom called The King of Queens for nine years, made a surprising jump to the screen as Will Smith’s sidekick in the romantic comedy Hitch. He is the only performer ever to upstage Smith in one of Smith’s own movies.

James began as a stand-up comedian, so range is not his strong suit. Having played a shleppy fat guy lovesick for a celebrity in Hitch, and a shleppy fat guy fireman widower who lives for his kids in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, here he plays a shleppy divorced fat guy lovesick for a beautiful girl who lives for his kid and wants to be a New Jersey state trooper.

Paul Blart is James’s first full-fledged loser character-a truly pathetic 40-year-old living with his obese mother and obese daughter who logs onto a dating website to find that he has no messages and no matches. (His Mexican wife married him for a green card, got pregnant to make it look good, then took off.) He fails the state trooper test again and again because he is so hypoglycemic he faints in the middle of the obstacle course he is running quite brilliantly.

Blart is a study in humorlessness. He takes his job as a security guard at a mall in West Orange, N.J., with a seriousness bordering on fanaticism. While the other guards are falling asleep and drinking on the job, he is revving himself up for Black Friday, the monster shopping day that comes the day after Thanksgiving.

James revels in Paul’s loserdom. The movie is an endless procession of fat jokes. Now, I am usually rather sensitive about fat jokes, for reasons having to do with my own avoirdupois issues. But I have to admit, these are pretty good ones. But the most inspired visual gags here come not from James’s bulk, but from his mode of transportation.

His costar is a Segway, the two-wheeled pogo stick-like conveyance that caused a frenzy a few years ago when no one knew what it was but everybody knew it had eaten up $100 million in development costs. The Segway has, indeed, caught on only in places like Disney World, where staffers have to travel some distance in areas where cars are not allowed. Blart goes up and down and around and sideways on the Segway, and at one particularly clever moment, rises from the gigantic play pit full of rubber balls riding the thing as though it were a dolphin breaching the surface of the ocean’s waters.

Blart is pathetic, but he’s a perfectly decent guy and knows the mall so well he is able to challenge a bunch of bad guys who take it over. His triumph is on a very small scale, like the movie itself; but as it pretends to nothing more, it is a rare production that actually exceeds the scope of its ambitions.

The key to understanding the success of Paul Blart, though, is its modesty in a different sense. There’s nary a curse word, nor is there (despite its title) a flatulence joke, or an exposed or near-exposed breast. He is an innocent, and so is the movie that surrounds him, and it seems clear that audiences have been hungering for a comedy that doesn’t force them to cover their own eyes in discomfort, their children’s eyes in embarrassment, or their grandmother’s in shame.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.