Paul is a comedy, or, at least, that’s what it says on the tin. The problem is, it’s not as funny as it should have been, and more importantly, it’s not as funny as it thinks it is. And that’s always worse.

Two guys – Simon Pegg and Nick Frost; who did a fantastic job in Hot Fuzz – are on a nerdy American road trip to visit Area 51 when they meet a bona fide alien (the titular Paul, voiced no more than adequately by Seth Rogen) somewhere in the Nevada Desert.

Cue hi-jinks and hilarity. Right? Well, no. Not really.

The humour never gets much beyond kindergarten level fish-out-of-water gags, and a romantic subplot which is about as contrived as it is awkward; and the only genuine surprise is the slight twist at the end, but by then I didn’t really care enough to wonder whether I had missed the signposts and the foreshadowing, or if the movie had not provided them in the first place.

Paul (the character) isn’t cute, isn’t wacky, and he doesn’t have any great emotional backstory either, so I’m unsure why we should care about him. Come on guys – if you’re not going to make me laugh, you have to give me something to go with.

I wanted to like it, but when you find yourself laughing because you feel you have to, rather than because it really is funny… well, that’s when you know the writers forgot the punchline.

Stephen King has published forty-nine novels (we won’t count Cycle of the Werewolf because that’s really just a picture book for grown-ups), and I have read thirty-one of them. They range from sublime (Misery), to mediocre (Dreamcatcher), and unfortunately, Cell sits towards the lower end of the spectrum.

It’s a great idea – the human population is turned into mindless zombies via a rogue mobile phone transmission, leaving a straggle of survivors (familiar King set up, I know) – but all the way through, it just feels like King is going through the motions, so he has something to send to the publishers. Dialogue – usually his forte – is stilted and functional at best, and the characters themselves are just not all that interesting. Even the ‘bad guy’, The Raggedy Man, comes off as a poor imitation of previous antagonists like Pennywise or Randall Flagg.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge King fan, but novels like Cell make me wonder why. There are a few standout sections, like the confusion of the opening chapter, and the assured way in which the (necessary) exposition is handled about one third of the way in, but mostly it just trundles along, trading on the name and past successes.

I remember someone saying that King was so famous he could publish his laundry list if he wanted. Well… there are moments, when I think he already has.