Paul

Directed by Greg Mottola

(R)

**

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“If you were visiting Earth for the first time,” you’d probably think this sci-fi spoof was a “decent comedy,” said Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News. If you know its stars’ hilarious previous work, however, you’re likely to be disappointed. Written by and starring Britain’s Simon Pegg and Nick Frost—the creative minds behind Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead—this “utterly mainstream effort” follows two overage English fan boys who encounter a real alien while on a dream trip to a San Diego sci-fi convention. Unfortunately, Paul the alien “isn’t merely voiced by” the usually funny Seth Rogen, said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. “He is Seth Rogen,” complete with all the juvenile behavior and four-letter words we expect from the man-boys in a Judd Apatow comedy. While Pegg and Frost’s British movies “stung with satirical precision,” Paul feels both “secondhand in its eagerness and unknowing in its scorn,” said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. In the team’s first attempt to create an American hit, they merely appear to be “adrift in foreign territory.”