PAUL Review (2 out of 5 stars)

Phone home? More like phone it in. (And stay home.)

Two British sci-fi geeks, Graeme Willy (Simon Pegg) and Clive Gollings (Nick Frost), set out from San Diego’s sci-fi/superhero fest Comic-Con on an RV tour of America’s UFO landmarks. (Not sure what those would include beyond Area 51 and Roswell...) Just as their adventure is getting underway, they witness a car crash involving Paul (Seth Rogen), an alien freshly escaped from a military base where he’s been sequestered for 60 years. The trio accidentally picks up a fourth, Ruth (Kristen Wiig), and soon her fanatical father and the Feds are on their tails in a race to return Paul to the mothership.

Paul's CGI is too crisp to seem real and is especially distracting when he’s in proximity to live actors — which is always. His character therefore lacks physical credibility; he might as well have been a cartoon. Perhaps it would have wise to show Rogen as an alien taking human form. The actor feels present anyway since Paul so closely resembles his typical, amiable wise guy characters. And instead of generic frat boy humor, I might've preferred Paul deadpan like Jason Bateman’s hilariously named agent, Lorenzo Zoil. Or even a neurotic alien would have been funnier. Paul boogeying around a campfire — Gaye's "Got to Give It Up" should be banned from further film use — or chucking a moon are antics meant for kids, not adults. Yet the movie is rated R for language, sexual references and drug use. (People blown up in explosions are apparently of no concern to the MPAA.)

The storyline of PAUL follows a pattern very much by the book. The alien’s discovered, he develops human friendships, over-zealous authorities get their chase on and it’s a race to get him home. No surprises there! Fortunately, however, there are occasional bright spots in the dialogue. A clever Bob Dylan joke, men's comments on a comic book character’s three boobs, people fainting at the sight of Paul, a men's room labeled "Maliens..." (The other said “Women.”) I laughed most when the newly toking Ruth went from giggly to ravenous to paranoid in seconds, then flopped over unconscious.

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