Plot
Paul Blart (Kevin James) is a middle-aged, single dad who lives with his teenage daughter, Maya (Raini Rodriguez), and elderly mother, Margaret (Shirley Knight). Blart is a mild-mannered yet overweight security guard who takes his job at the West Orange Pavilion Mall in New Jersey very seriously. He aspires to become a member of the New Jersey State Police, but due to his hypoglycemic medical condition, he faints and fails the physical entrance exam. While on patrol at work one day, Blart notices a new kiosk in the mall and is instantly attracted to its vendor, Amy Anderson (Jayma Mays). However, he has a hard time finding the courage to speak to her. Meanwhile, Blart has been given the assignment of training a new rookie, Veck Simms (Keir O'Donnell), who shows very little interest in his new-found position as a mall security guard.
Blart eventually becomes acquainted with Amy, and one evening as he escorts her to her car, Amy invites Blart to join her and other mall employees at a party later that evening. Blart gladly accepts. During the event, things initially go well, but Blart eventually gets sidetracked by participating in a nacho-eating contest with an overweight friend, Leon (Jamal Mixon). The hot sauce is more than Blart can handle, and he begins chugging alcoholic drinks in an effort to console the pain. As a result, Blart gets excessively drunk and incoherent, crashes the party, and makes a wild exit by falling through a window. The behavior temporarily stalls his relationship with Amy.
On Black Friday, a gang of criminals disguised as mall employees take over a bank as the mall begins to close. Amy and other customers in line are taken hostage. Veck is revealed as the gang's leader, who plans to use credit card codes obtained from various stores around the mall to steal $30 million, while keeping the hostages as insurance to escape. The crew of thieves force shoppers to exit the mall and strategically place motion sensors around each entrance, apparently revealing the real reason Veck took the security guard position in the first place – to gather intel and find flaws with the mall's security. Blart, who was in a nearby electronics store playing a video game, doesn't notice what's happened.
As Blart leaves the arcade, he notices that the entire mall has been taken over and calls the police, who later show up outside the front entrance of the mall. Sergeant Howard (Adam Ferrara), the scene commander, instructs Blart to leave the mall immediately, but when Blart sees Amy's car in the parking lot, he realizes that Amy is still inside as a hostage, and decides to rescue her and the rest of his friends. A state SWAT team soon arrives and Commander James Kent (Bobby Cannavale), a classmate and bully from Blart's high school, takes control of the situation. Though vastly outnumbered and physically outclassed, Blart fights against the gang members through improvised measures. He discovers the credit card codes written in invisible ink on the robbers' arms and records them in his cell phone. Maya, unaware of the takeover, shows up at the mall to bring Blart his dinner, but Veck's remaining henchmen kidnap her and hold her hostage as well.
After detaining all of Veck's underlings, Blart attempts to extract the hostages by pulling them up through an airvent, but fails after Leon cannot fit. Veck enters the room, and Blart is captured. He forces Blart to give up the credit card codes and escapes, taking Amy and Maya with him at gunpoint.
As policemen swarm the mall to apprehend the criminals and rescue the hostages, Blart steals a display minivan and joins Kent in pursuing Veck to the airport, where Veck attempts to escape to the Cayman Islands with Amy and Maya. After a brief fight, Blart overpowers and handcuffs Veck. However, Kent pulls his gun on Blart, revealing himself as a mole in the SWAT team who had been working with Veck the whole time. Kent demands Blart to give him the phone containing the codes, but Blart refuses and smashes it on the ground. Before Kent can kill Blart, Mall Security Chief Brooks (Peter Gerety), who had stayed at the mall throughout the standoff, arrives and shoots Kent in the arm; the police arrive at the airport, where Kent is arrested and Amy and Maya rescued. Blart then expresses his feelings for Amy by giving her a birthday card (it having been her birthday).
The next day, Sergeant Howard offers Blart a job with the West Orange Police, but Blart decides that his place is protecting the people at the mall with Amy and the rest of his friends. The movie ends with Blart and Amy getting married in the mall.
Read more about this topic: Paul Blart: Mall Cop
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)