Paul Review

The creature is the achievement. Paul is animated with enough weight and expression to sit convincingly in a diner booth, and Rogen's vocal performance gives him a slouchy, profane decency that carries scenes the script does not support. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are as easy together as ever, and Kristen Wiig commits fully to a gag about a sheltered woman discovering blasphemy. Greg Mottola directs warmly and the southwest looks genuinely inviting. The complaints center on the writing.

Where the earlier Pegg and Frost films used genre knowledge as a foundation, this one uses it as content, stopping repeatedly to point at Spielberg and Lucas as though recognition were the same thing as a punchline. The chase plot is inert, the government agents are stock, and the religion material is aimed at a target so soft the satire never connects. Jason Bateman is wasted in a role that asks him to glower. Critics generally land in the same place: pleasant, good natured and considerably less clever than the films it keeps saluting, and best in the quiet stretches where three friends are simply driving.