Paul Blart: Mall Cop

When trailers for “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” started hitting the airwaves in late December, they didn’t exactly put members of the Academy on notice. The tale of an overweight mall cop who takes his job too seriously doesn’t seem like it would resonate too deeply come awards season. And it won’t.

But it is a comedy that provides good, clean laughs for what it offers, and sometimes that’s all it takes to make a decent movie. What starts as a standard dumb famly comedy evolves into a decent send-up of the over-the-top ‘80’s action movies.

Kevin James plays the rotund title character, a mall security guard who enjoys peanut butter on his pie and harbors dreams of being a real cop, channeling that ambition into his mall security job. A single parent, his daughter and mother spend their time trying to find him a girlfriend via an online dating site.

The role is similar to the one that made him famous, in “The King of Queens,” with Jayma Mays playing the part of the attractive woman that is inexplicably attracted to him.

The most serious part of the film is the opening credits, when a “JFK-“ like theme plays over close-ups of a mall security badge. From there it devolves into slapstick comedy, jokes so bad they’re funny and other staples of mediocre comedies.

The plot of the film is incredibly cliché, with the single-parent James falling for the doe-eyed woman who works at the wig kiosk, and he is forced to save her when she is taken hostage by the terrorists who take over the mall.

While the plot has more holes in it than , the jokes are solid. James provides the best segway humor since Will Arnett in “Arrested Development,” and he can take a pratfall with the best of them.

Since the movie is rated PG, it provides laughs without the nudity and profanity that so many comedies of late rely so heavily upon.

The villains are a group of terrorists who, for some reason, prefer to skate, leap or bike their way around the mall, and very rarely do they use their guns. The terrorists are so hackneyed at times that it’s painful to watch.

The supporting cast mostly drags down the movie, with the exception of Stephen Ranna zzisi, who plays a pen salesman in the mall. He draws laughs every time he is on the screen, and he is the perfect obnoxious foil to Kevin James’ goodhearted nature. Think of him as the Ellis character from “Die Hard.”

Throughout the course of the movie, James becomes a combination of John McClane and Rambo. Except in this case, the Nakatomi Tower has been replaced with the West Orange Pavilion Mall and the Vietnamese jungle is the Rainforest Café.

In a world of gross-out comedies, “Paul Blart” shows that you don’t need f-bombs or nudity to get laughs. Sometimes a fat man on a Segway running into the back of a minivan will do just fine.

Rating - $6.00