Paul Blart: Mall Cop A Movie Review	MPAA Rated - PG It's 1:27 Long A Review by The Dude on the Right

As I wrote, Kevin James plays Paul Blart.  His dream is to be a New Jersey State Trooper, but sadly his portliness, as well as his need for sugar, stop him short every time he goes for it.  With that Paul is left as the, well, a security officer at a mall, and he takes his job very seriously, so much so that in one scene he attempts to ticket a senior citizen driving recklessly around the mall on his scooter.  Paul, though, has the upper hand, as he has a tricked-out Segway to cruise around the mall and protect the customers, and it’s also useful to pick up chicks, or at least the girl of Paul’s dream, Amy (the cute Jayma Mays), by giving her a ride to her car.  Paul’s family is looking for him to meet a good woman (they sign him up for some online dating site), but mostly Paul is just concerned about mall safety, and nothing is more challenging in the days of mall safety than Black Friday, aka the day after Thanksgiving.

Enter a group of thieves with a wacked-out plan to steal the credit card codes for the day, and our hero will now be on a mission to save those left in the mall, one of whom is Amy, and another happens to be a dopey “plot twist,” or something like that.

Anyway, our group of thieves is led by Veck (Kier O’Donnell), which actually wasn’t a surprise to me, who commands a rag-tag posse of X-Game athletes who use bikes, skateboards, and their own agilities, to bounce around the mall in joyful glee on their way to gather the credit card codes.  But Paul slowly figures out their plan, and one-by-one takes out the bad dudes and dudettes, (who also happen to be the most inept people in the world) leaving the climactic ending of Paul vs. Veck, or is it?

So we’ve got Paul Blart, in all of his chubbiness glory, throwing his weight around as a fat guy would in a fat guy comedy, against a group of inept thieves who are supposed to be smart and agile, yet are just plain stupid and clumsy.  Then we’ve got a sub-plot reminiscent of “Die Hard,” and of course a love story that couldn’t be more obvious than, well, obviousness.  And, oh yea, let’s not forget a movie soundtrack of classic hits to go with many a scene.

Look, “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” is a fat guy comedy, and sadly, doesn’t try to be anything more than a fat guy comedy, which is too bad because there are times when Kevin James shows why we liked him so much in “King of Queens.”  Jayma Mays is cute enough as the love interest, and some funniness does come about from Pahud (Adhir Kalyan) who is trying to find his girlfriend, whose phone Paul has borrowed, but in the end the pratfalls are those geared towards the younger crowd, though not too young, in the PG rating the movie has.

For me, “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” was about a ½ star movie, for the 8 year olds in the crowd (and probably my sister) it was around a 3 star movie, so I’m going to average them out and round down, because I can, and give the movie 1 ½ stars out of 5.  Wait for it to come out on cable, plop your 8 year old in front of the TV, and go do some yard work.

That’s it for this one!  I’m The Dude on the Right!!  L8R!!!