Paul

For more than a decade, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have worked together in various British TV and movie comedies (from Spaced through Shaun of the Dead to Hot Fuzz) that displayed their lower-middle-class Everyman personas. Sweeter than Ricky Gervais's snide cynic, and less bumbling than Richard Curtis characters, they form a happy comic duo of smiling shortness and bashful fattiness. Their first co-written movie, Paul, has been a worthy winner critically and at the North American box-office (which knows Pegg better from the Star Trek re-boot).

Their concept was a delightfully comic, complex send-up of sci-fi movies. A comic-book writer and his illustrator pal go to the Comic-Con trade show in the USA and then set off on a road trip to sight-see desolate spots renowned for UFO sightings. They are forced to give refuge in their RV to Paul, a pointy-headed alien with a dirty mouth, "spaceman balls" and attitude problems.

He's escaped from a government secret programme headed by an off-screen alpha female (Sigourney Weaver deploying her distinctive vocal menace), and is pursued by her laconic lieutenant (Jason Bateman on good dead-pan form) and his pair of gormless henchmen. Driving Paul to the destination where a spaceship can rescue him, the naif Brits collect en route the one-eyed daughter (Kristen Wiig) of a rabid Christian backwoodsman.

An elderly woman (Blythe Danner), who'd helped Paul after his crash-landing on Earth sixty years before, has to be taken on board too, before they and their pursuers reach a mountain whose shape recalls a movie about close encounters (whose director, among others, is shown to have used Paul with official approval as a creative consultant).

The quick-moving action comedy incorporates many other references to the sci-fi genre, and is directed with snappy panache by Greg (Superbad) Mottola, who wrote and directed the multi-award-winning The Daytrippers in 1996 and had less success with Adventureland in 2009.

The producers seem to have decided that the screenplay's Creationism-defying atheistic Darwinian tone and bug-eyed anti-hero (voiced with suitable comic bile by Seth Rogen) would never gain loving laughs in America's Bible Belt. So they also made him a smoker leading others astray while prompting them to lard their dialogue with coatings of four-letter words. These are so profuse (especially in the "Unrated" DVD version) that the well-cast cast act embarrassed by their professional duty to appeal to smutty teens in multiplex audiences. They did; the movie's shown a profit on box-office receipts alone.

In the end credits, Jane Lynch, seen in an early cameo as a diner waitress, re-appears to do her scripted bit for lesbian rights; Pegg and Frost had already tossed in a few gay male confusions. A sequel to be made (to be called, they joke, Pauls). If they really want to piss off, cock-suck, fuck up, and fart in the face of, the God-fearing, they could call it St Paul's Balls ?