Again, Paul (and Wonder Woman)

So, further thinking about why Paul got a meh from me, I think a lot of it boils down to the relationship. In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun actually was a bad boyfriend, and had to change. And in Hot Fuzz, Nicholas and Danny weren't in a relationship (just go with it, yaoi fangirls), but they did have a bromance, and both of them did have to change.

In Paul, Kristen Wigg's character shows up, she and Pegg fall in love at first sight, then she sees the alien and faints and Pegg decides to kidnap her (instead of just leaving her behind when they go) because he's in love with her (despite the fact that not five seconds ago, she turned out to be enough of a Jesus freak to want to shoot Darwin in the head. And it's Kristen Wigg. Not to be shallow, but there's a difference between Olivia Wilde being a psycho and Kristen Wigg being a psycho.) So she wakes up, and in the course of one mostly unheard conversation, she completely abandons her religion and falls in love with Pegg. And when her father comes to save her from her kidnappers, he's treated as just another source of false conflict.

Now, setting aside the feminist and religious objections you could build up to this (maybe in Paul 2, they could have a Muslim woman rip off her hijab and do a striptease after Paul mind-whammies her), it's just flat. There's no conflict there and no character-building required for the relationship to work. Which means there's no goals, which means there's a decided lack of something you can root for the character to accomplish. It'd be like if the only thing the characters in Shaun of the Dead were doing was trying to survive the zombie apocalypse. You'd just have a zombie movie, instead of a great comedy (in short, Zombieland).

( You know who's interesting to read about? Wonder Woman. )