REVIEW: Seth Rogen Meets Brit Fizz in Smart, Saucy Alien Tale Paul

Maybe it's a Canadian thing. Like his countryman, Kiefer Sutherland, Seth Rogen has a voice that's 10 years older than he is -- a combination of world-weariness and exuberance, an instrument that he's mastered for specific comic shadings. Sutherland wrings anger and shock from the premature gray in his, and by the time 24 ended, he'd physically caught up with the age emanating from his larynx. In the likable, misfits-on-the road comedy Paul, Rogen's soulful rustiness is used for the sound of the intergalactic traveler. With it, he lays a claim to being one of the premier vocal talents of his generation.

Paul also stars -- and was written by -- Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who, along with their Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright, are architects of the cinematic Power Pop that made up the 21st-century British Invasion. (They write characters with the foggy volubility of the onscreen Beatles, but not the assurance.) They play archetypal sci-fi aficionados and comics creators with the equally archetypal Brit names Graeme (Pegg) and Clive (Frost). That they have names out of a Wodehouse novel - or, more appropriately, a Monty Python sketch - is fitting, since they're visiting the States to hit the San Diego Comic-Con and then take an RV tour of Southwestern landmarks they've come across in the novels, movies and comics they've gorged on. When they see space alien Paul, they react the way anyone would in the fiction they've enjoyed: they faint.

Director Greg Mottola, a specialist in films about literal and metaphorical journeys -- he did it both in the indie (The Daytrippers, Adventureland) and studio (Superbad, working from a script that Rogen co-authored) environments -- gives a slight dramatic heft to the material by heightening the vignette aspect of the Pegg/Frost script. He does so partially by ensuring that Paul shape-shifts every time the group encounters someone else, and burrowing so deeply into the episodic nature of the script that the fact that this road movie really isn't about the destination doesn't matter. He's also less brisk and overdeliberate in his direction than Wright, which gives Paul more a laconic '70s film feel rather the Buzz Cola fizziness we've seen in previous Pegg/Frost movies.

Graeme and Clive exist mostly as straight men, either to Paul or the script's passel of yokels whose knuckles kick up sparks from dragging on the two-lane blacktops; the Pegg/Frost chemistry (and history) has to sharpen what's not quite on the page. Much of Paul after they encounter the alien, and are on the run with him, has an amusing undercurrent, especially the sublimated shame Graeme and Clive -- who should know better how to deal with an otherworldly illegal -- feel and which manifests itself in different ways with each of them. Their lack of characterization can explain to some extent because, as a construct, Paul brings everyone he contacts into sharper relief -- and not only because of the acuity of Rogen's clever robustness, a counterpoint to Paul's being rendered as an intentional CG collection of visual clichés. Pegg and Frost expended a great deal of energy in explaining the alien and his effect on people: He's a fully fleshed-out device, which places a lot of weight on the cast.

Fortunately, the movie is studded with performances that demonstrate the cast's skills, such as Kristen Wiig's soggy white-bread delusional Christian Ruth. Wiig shows a nearly possessed purpose in her movie roles, yet varies the pitch each time out - from the lost-in-her-own-delivery bear trainer in Semi Pro to the determined skater/single mom in Whip It to Ruth in Paul. The wide screen allows Wiig to show the tiniest hints of differentiation in her piercing stare, the signal that each of her characters means business - she's always particularly, and peculiarly, set in her ways, and her literal meeting of minds with Paul throws her fixed purview into the rearview mirror. Jason Bateman, Bill Hader and Joe Lo Troglio, as the federal agents out to return Paul to whatever maximum- security Area 51 cell he crept out of make an impact, too. They pick up on the manic focus that Wiig utilizes in their hard-target pursuit.

Paul himself is defined as a character that has obliterated the line between instinct and behavior and provides a running commentary on it, a Rogen forte that seems to have its roots in screwball comedy where the characters trip over their tongues explaining themselves. (His B.O.B. in the Monsters Vs Aliens trailer alone made me want to see that half-film; his cheery reading of "It turns out you don't need one!" when someone whispers that B.O.B. doesn't have a brain has more scale and depth than all of the movie's 3-D.)

What's funniest about Paul however, is that each of its characters is stunned out of their complacency, right down to a humorous and touching revelation in the climax. That's what Pegg and Frost want the film to do; ironically, Paul is effectively screaming the "Wake up!" message that Kevin McCarthy was driven to bellow in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He just does so without as many teeth.