Metacritic reviews

Has a few surprises in store. The biggest is James, an unexpectedly nimble master of the face-plant, the failed jump, and the lopsided tumble.

It's as slam-bang preposterous as any R-rated comedy you can name. It's just that Paul Blart and the film's other characters don't feel the need to use the f-word as the building block of every sentence.

Done as an all-out battle to the death, this could have been an entertaining mix of "Die Hard" and "The A-Team."

The film is completely forgettable, frequently funny and weirdly satisfying in a Jersey Loser Gets Respect kind of way.

Mediocre, unmemorable comedy.

The only real difference between this and the handful of other Happy Madison flicks is that James (executive producer, co-writer, star) has made this Sandleresque movie family-friendly, with very little swearing, no nudity and all the edginess of a "King of Queens" rerun.

Underneath all the cartoonish mall mayhem and silly slapstick lies a comedy that aspires to be the sort of gentle crowd-pleaser John Hughes used to make.

James has a sweet, appealing presence, but the dreary, joke-light script and generic direction do him no favors.

Great comics from Jerry Lewis to Peter Sellers have turned pathetic into comedic. But James never seems to able to get beyond pathetic.

An almost shockingly amateurish one-note-joke comedy.