Paul Reviews
Top Critic
The film has some laughs. But it also has a million jokes about anal probes, alien genitalia, and people thinking Clive and Graeme are gay. These guys can do better than this.
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| Original Score: C
The CGI alien is very well articulated, and Rogen is a virtuoso at mixing motormouthed rudeness with a hint of tenderness to take off the edge.
Paul is arguably the best science fiction comedy since Galaxy Quest.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This is not quite enough of a conceit to sustain a full-length movie -- Paul would have made a terrific short film -- but there are incidental pleasures all along the way.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
The results, it must be said, are less hi-larious than sporadically mid-to-low-larious.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
In the end - as well as the middle and maybe even at the outset - Paul is more often a close encounter of the middling kind.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The results are, again, not-quite-brilliant but funny enough.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Beam us up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life here.
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| Original Score: 2/4
'Paul' is more a bagful of giggles. Rogen is a nonstop hoot, but it's the byplay between Frost and Pegg that roots the laughs in characters we care about.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's more than occasionally cute, if less than consistently clever.
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| Original Score: 2/4
What has happened to Pegg? Why does he mug so? Why can't he relax and let the audience come to him, rather than auditioning for our affection with every reaction shot?
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Set your humor-detection capacitors for moderate to above-average intake levels. I haven't laughed this much since maybe last Monday, but that was a particularly strong Monday.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
How could so many talented people collaborate on something so dull?
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| Original Score: 1/4
While Frost is particularly well-cast, most of the actors seem to be having fun. You will, too, as long as you arrive with lowered expectations.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Here's a movie that teeters on the edge of being really pretty good and loses its way.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
What makes the film largely work, despite its occasional slackness and over-trodden terrain, is its overall affability (and smutty words).
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
This is a well-made, well-plotted and sensitive movie.
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| Original Score: 3/4
After the sharp bite and harsh light of most American-style guy-based funny films today, "Paul" comes as such sweet relief.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
It's not out of this world, but Paul is just spacey enough to convince us the truth is out there. And buzzed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
[Pegg and Frost'] successes seem to have functioned as a supermagnet, attracting not only the skilled comedy director Greg Mottola but a supporting cast that could sustain two or three movies on its own.
Think of Paul as a love letter to fanboys, especially the variety that knows the standards well enough to hoot along every time a sci-fi hit rings up a reference.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
"Paul" gets messy in places and is a bit overlong, but overall it's great fun; so much so that you wonder why the makers of dreary Hollywood comedies don't take a look at this and realize that yes, you can make a funny movie without gross-out humor.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Because of the lethargic pace, cheeky jokes become positively jowly. And the easy lampoons of rednecks and bible thumpers beg to be called "Close Encounters of the secondhand."
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| Original Score: 2/4
Missteps aside, there are lots of good ideas packed into the movie.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Not bad, but certainly not good; classify the movie as lazy fun.
Never achieves the exhilarating feat of exemplifying the types of Hollywood movies it wants to unpack. The airline's lost their luggage.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
There's simply no cure for the fundamental laziness behind "Paul," which amounts to a recycling program for tired gags about nerds, gays, nervous-nelly Brits, dumbass Yanks and little green men.
A simple, entertaining road-trip movie that doesn't ask us to do much more than strap in and enjoy the trip.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A celebration of sci-fi flicks, fanboys and good, old-fashioned bromance, "Paul" is a thoroughly enjoyable road trip.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
What's frustrating is how consistently the film waffles between the inspired and the inept.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
That's not to dismiss Paul's simple pleasures -- if nothing else, its fondness for sex and drugs and four-letter words rescues its references from the soft hands of wee ones into which they've fallen of late.
It's C-minus work from people who normally deliver A-level efforts.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Part bromance, part sci-fi spoof and all a bit disappointing.
There are plenty of giggly gags but also a hint of diminishing returns.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
A sci-fi spoof for everyone with funny encounters that will require close attention.
