First Hit: This film fails in just about every way. There are only a few really and truly funny bits (most of them seen in the previews) and the tired plot of overweight bumpkin getting hot girl is tired, especially in this approach.
The dearth of films during January was the second reason I saw this film. The first reason is that it topped the box office receipts for a couple of weeks. How this film gets seen by so many people and it hangs on for a few weeks is beyond me.
We have this overweight character, Paul Blart (Played by Kevin James) who continues to fail the test for entrance into the police academy. The reason he fails is not because he is unfit and probably couldn’t do the obstacle course as we are shown in the opening moments of the film but because he is hypoglycemic and passes out if he doesn’t have a sugar fix. That he passes out one foot from finishing the test is unbelievable.
The premise is poor and the film sinks from there. The bad guy Veck Sims (Played by Keir O’Donnell) in the film attempts to act as if he and his gang of bad boys have the chops to do the crime they are planning, but there is no evidence that they do.
Nothing in this film is believable, except that you get that Paul and his daughter Maya (played by Raini Rodriguez) have a good and solid relationship.
The storyline and writing is very weak and is even weaker in its delivery. I would think that a stronger use of the setting (a major mall) would have proved more interesting along with a more believable criminal element might have moved this film up a notch, but what it needed was a good story and it wasn’t there.
Overall: This was a poorly executed bit of fluff that, for all intensive purposes, had potential when the original pitch was made.