Paul Blart Mall Cop

Comedian Kevin James takes on the role of screenwriter, together with Nick Bakay, in the Steve Carr-directed turkey Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Next time, he might want to leave the screenwriting to the professionals.

Our mall cop--that's Blart, played by James--has nothing going on in life. He's a single dad whose wife left him once she got her green card; his superiors make fun of him to his face, and so does the sleazy pen salesman who's hitting on the girl he likes.

Then the mall is captured and locked down by a gang of thugs who want to rip off all the credit card transactions processed in the shopping center on "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving and traditionally the start of the Christmas shopping season--also, traditionally, the biggest day of the year for retail shops.

There's only one guy brave--and lucky--enough to stop the crooks, and that's Paul Blart. (It helps that Amy (Jaytma Mays), the hair extension saleswoman he's crushing on, is one of the hostages. It doesn't help that Stuart (Stephen Rannazzisi), the sleazy pen guy, is also a hostage. It helps a little that the leader of the gang (Keir O'Donnell) is more interested in jeering at Blart for his weight and his insecurities than in actually shooting him.)

Sounds like fun, but as it turns out, the movie is a bigger turkey than the roasted bird Blart and his family devour the day before Black Friday.

It's not the James, who sprang to fame in the TV series "The King of Queens," doesn't do his Everyman schtick with heart and charm. He does; scenes of his character, the oft-defeated adn hypoglycemia-afflicted Paul Blart, at home with his mother and daughter, slathering pie with peanut butter and plastering a brave grin onto his face with each disappointment that comes his way, are the best of the movie's scant good parts.

The problem isn't even the slap-stick, slap-dash storyline: what could be more slyly subversive than a shopping mall being taken over and occupied by a bunch of parkour-stunting, stunt-bike riding, skateboard-tricking crooks? Indeed, this mall has been commandeered by mall rats. Throwing Paul Blart, a state police training washout and general loser, into the thick of it, "Die Hard" style, has promise, if not for action-movie thrills then at least for Rube Goldberg-esque "Alone At Home" laughs.

There are some such twists, of course--how could there not be? Blart knows his mall, and his dedicated to its protection--and there are moments of inspired visual invention, such as Blart rising, Nosferatu-like, from a bin full of rubber balls, still mounted on his trusty Segway.

And James is nothing if not enviably graceful whilst mounted on the vehicle. Even off it, he moves lightly for a man of such bulk; spinning and sporting on his Segway, however, he's the Fred Astaire of the two-wheeled conveyance.

But there's so little momentum in the script, and so much extraneous noise, that the moral of the story ends up lost. Don't worry about being a big shot, just be a good, honest, hard-working person, and things will turn out fine: that's the essential message, and it plays well against a backdrop of empty consumerism, including Internet dating services.

However, this homey (if trite) sentiment is buried under scads of weak jokes and poorly conceived set-pieces, not to mention some glaringly contrived twists (one of which, involving a horny tech-savvy teen and a GPS-enabled cell phone, doesn't invite very careful scrutiny: "Don't judge me!" snaps the teen, and we're happy to oblige. Indeed, it's too bad his presence is part of the film at all).

The movie only gets worse as it rattles along, and by the time of the final showdown between Blart and his nemesis, the whole film has dissolved into steadfastly un-funny silliness. Like many American movies, it ends with the arrival of emergency rescue vehicles and the swaddling of the good guys in blankets. What they need to do now is pass a few of those comforting blankets out to the audience.