Forget ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Paul is the real deal.
The real deal in comedy, that is.
Paul takes all the alien movies of the past, puts them in a mixer and comes up with a fun journey for this veteran alien and two British sci-fi geeks.
Graeme Willy
(Simon Pegg) and Clive Gollings (Nick Frost) are childhood mates who have always loved the comic book/sci-fi/alien-geek culture, so for the trip of a lifetime they journey from Britain to San Diego for the huge Comic-Con convention.
They then plan to tour around the Midwest and visit America's UFO heartland, places they have worshipped since childhood. They think they would dearly love to meet an alien on their travels.
Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) fulfills that wish.
Paul has been on Earth for 60 years helping out the secret service with knowledge about aliens. When they decide Paul has outlived his usefulness and must be destroyed, Paul escapes and heads for the place where he can be rescued by his own kind.
When Paul crashes his car, the first on the scene are Graeme and Clive who get to live their dream - when they recover from seeing a real alien that is.
Paul is a wonderfully fun-loving alien with some clever powers and a wicked sense of humour.
Things get a little tricky for Paul and the boys when the secret service gets on their tail, determined to return Paul to his original fate.
As you might imagine, Graeme and Clive are far from the most accomplished accomplices and they manage to find trouble at every turn and barely manage to stay at large.
Paul's journey is a lot of fun. Pegg and Frost bring a wonderfully light touch to this comedy, while poking fun at the epic alien movies.
Paul is a delightful character, who manages to steal the show in this very entertaining movie.
4/5
(R13) 104 minutes
