-By Frank Lovece

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If this weren't a major studio movie from a high successfully production company, with a hit sitcom's star and a director of $100 million hits (Eddie Murphy's Dr. Dolittle 2 and Daddy Day Care) plus a low-budget major-moneymaker (Next Friday), I might have used more judicious language. Given all the preceding, however, let's save everyone's time: Paul Blart: Mall Cop is a terrible, terrible movie. It rivals Code Name: The Cleaner (2007) and Witless Protection (2008) as the worst amateur-law-enforcer movie ever made.

Yes, of course, Kevin James has always been a likeable stand-up comic and sitcom star. But he co-wrote this turkey, so you can't let him off the hook. He's been fine in a movie supporting role or two, but despite being the star of a sitcom, the inexplicably long-lived "The King of Queens" (CBS, 1998-2007), he cannot carry his own feature any more comfortably than he can carry his weight—and you can hold your PC pounce, since his obesity becomes a fair target when his movie refers to it directly and tries to use it for laughs.

James play the titular Paul Blart, a depressed single dad in New Jersey, who lives with his mom (veteran screen great Shirley Knight) and rides a Segway to and around work as a security guard at the West Orange Pavilion Mall (played by the Burlington Mall in Burlington, Mass.).

Disturbingly self-deluded about his job and his authority, and bearing a trivia-king personality with social skills so undeveloped that his way of getting to know an attractive new mall worker (Jayma Mays) falls pretty much under "creepy stalker," there's little way the movie could make its hero less appealing. Oh, wait! The movie does! It makes him a gluttonous food addict who doesn't seek help, and a horrible, loud, sloppy, fall-down drunk!

The film turns into Die Hard-in-a-mall when computer whiz Veck Sims (Keir O'Donnell) and his team of—get this—young BMX, skateboard and parkour punks empty the place save for six hostages, then barricade themselves and go about gathering codes from credit-card machines. Nothing in the caper makes sense, including how they plan to escape a mall surrounded by both local police and a SWAT team. (A twist at the end makes it no less stupid.) You'd think the action choreography might at least be fun, but none of the young athletes is shot in any way that showcases speed, grace or the least bit of interest. Chase scenes are so poorly cut together that, for instance, a skateboarder right on Blart's tail is nowhere to be seen in the next continuous shot, allowing our heavy hero to make the cinema's most boring and improbable escapes.

All this said, a couple of teenage boys outside the Times Square preview screening were chuckling to themselves about how funny the film was. Then again, they may have thought the same thing of Witless Protection.