Movie Review - Paul - Starring Nick Frost & Simon Pegg

Movies like Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead have been heralded as geek masterpieces and have found their way to be pop culture icons in themselves. So, naturally, when a new project of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost hits theaters, it's going to cause some excitement. But, is the latest worthy of comparison to their previous movies? Sure, why not.

Paul is a movie about two nerds (Pegg and Frost) straight out of Comic-Con. They encounter a fowl-mouthed alien and attempt to help him get home, resulting in a cross-country trip, dodging and evading federal agents who want their alien back.

It's a pretty straight-forward description, isn't it? That is because the movie is very basic. The storyline uses basically an E.T. type format and modernizes it, adding two love able characters in place of the annoying little kid. The film even jokes about E.T. in several spots that are hilarious.

The execution on this film more than makes up for the simplistic script. Pegg and Frost are perfect, as always in this film. They both have a child-like wonderment upon seeing Paul for the first time, and the trip, and the characters themselves seem very authentic. It looks like all the actors were having a great time filming this movie, and seeing that just puts a smile on your face you won't be able to remove throughout the film.

This film is for movie geeks. I don't think it ruins the experience if you're not, but you will miss the many, many movie references littered throughout. I loved the Star Trek fight scene with the Gorn they reenacted, or how Paul asks for Reeses Pieces, or the brilliantly timed line from the bad guys lips towards the end, and especially the comic-con experience they showed at the beginning, which looked very authentic.

The movie was a little weird for me, in that except for the over-the-top fowl language, it was pretty much a family movie. The characters were sweet, and cute, and fun, and the language and a scene involving drug use is what pushed this to the R-rating, and it wasn't really necessary. Sure, it added some funny gags, but it could've been toned down to a PG-13 rating and lost maybe one joke, in a movie full of them.

Overall, it was a fun movie to watch. It won't be knocking off Shaun of the Dead as the top movie for Simon Pegg, but it does add to a widening collection of great movies churned out by the actor. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a simple, fun movie to go see, and it goes double if you're in to movies.