Movie Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

by KYW's Bill Wine

The opening reels of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World are a wonder of briskly displayed inventiveness, a burst of organized chaos that's part comic book, part video game, part music video, part manic manga, part arrested-development animé, part "aye-aye" eye candy, and all adolescent energy and exuberance.

It's a modest triumph of rapid-fire style over substance that wins us over early, then falters in the stretch, but lingers fondly in the memory.

Michael Cera stars as the title character, a jobless, geeky 22-year-old who's an indie-rock bassist in a low-profile garage band in Toronto.

He was unceremoniously dumped from a romantic relationship a year ago by Envy Adams (Brie Larson), who not only crushed him by rejecting him but had the audacity to become a recognized rock star.

Oh well.

Now, he's being stalked by (or is he just dating?) a high schooler (Ellen Wong), and everybody in his life -- his bandmates (played by Allison Pill, Johnny Simmons, and Stephen Stills), his sister (Anna Kendrick), and his roommate (Kieran Culkin) -- notices that he's stuck in neutral.

Then he spies Ramona Flowers, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, a woman whose hair color changes with alarming frequency but with whom he is immediately smitten.  She may be available, but she tells him that to win her over he must defeat her seven ex-boyfriends, comprising a League of Evil Exes, dating all the way back to middle school -- including the likes of Jason Schwartzman, Brandon Routh, and Chris Evans -- in physical battle.

(Formidable-foe "in" joke alert: Routh played Superman in Superman Returns and Evans was The Human Torch in Fantastic Four.)

Good thing this Pilgrim has some martial-arts moves, at least in his dream world.

British director and producer Edgar Wright, who has two distinctive comedies on his résumé -- the very funny Shaun of the Dead and the less accomplished Hot Fuzz -- co-wrote the data-overload screenplay with Michael Bacall based on the graphic novel (that is, comic book) series by Bryan Lee O'Malley.

In it, reality and fantasy bleed into one another until they're indistinguishable: whether this is a good or bad thing will be a matter of taste and, probably, age.

But Wright also does lots of post-production tinkering, piling on the split screens and the sight gags and the graffiti and the sound effects and all the other attention-deficit-defying tricks he can conjure to make his core audience of gamers, texters, and pop-culture consumers feel right at home.

His shaky central conceit -- the staged combat flourishes for no good reason that add up to one overextended metaphor about the difficulty of true love and the need to fight for it -- doesn't stand up to scrutiny.  And questioning the arbitrariness of this never-really-explained narrative strategy is seen as a party-pooping refusal to go with the flow.

But, then, we've already agreed to leave internal logic behind as we entered through these gates.

Still, he does pay a price for the hyperactive-bombardment approach: it undercuts our emotional connection to the central relationship.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is resourcefully shot and aggressively edited, bursting with color, dotted with pop-up captions, self-indulgent, but funny anyway.

But the juvenile excess eventually wears down everyone but committed fans of the source material, who probably feel that bringing actual narrative momentum to a movie this liberatingly free-floating would be in disappointingly good taste.

So expect a letdown, if not a slowdown, in act three. But what precedes it is frisky fun.

The ever-blossoming Cera brings his goofy-charm persona to this underdog role and throws in some surprisingly acrobatic martial-arts moves as well.   Okay -- Cera, Cera, whatever will be, will be.

As for us, we'll battle 2½ stars out of 4 for the stylized and stimulating romantic comedy, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. A world beater it's not, but a nifty novelty and a curious charmer it is.