SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD is almost entirely style over substance, which is something I would normally guard against. But the fact is that this film is so thoroughly entertaining, so completely charged with energy and adrenaline, that its style takes you to another place. If I'm being honest with myself, I'm likely a few years past the age this film is being marketed to, but it didn't matter. I got sucked in, I laughed a lot, and I went on a ride. And while that's not typically my criteria for a good movie, it was more than enough this time.
Based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, SCOTT PILGRIM is the story of a 22-year-old bass player (Michael Cera) in a barely-there garage band called "Sex Bob Omb" who surprises his bandmates and his gay roommate (Kieran Culkin) when he announces that he is dating a 17-year-old girl. The girl, comically named "Knives Chau," gives Scott little more than blue balls and distracts his bandmates. And then, like in any good romance film, SHE walks in...
"She" is Ramona Flowers, a mysterious punk of a girl and effortless flirt. Scott is immediately in love. Ramona's much higher hip-factor makes her a better choice in the eyes of Scott's friends, but he is too much of a wuss to immediately break things off with Knives. And at this point, the story probably seems like anything on MTV that stars people in their late teens or early 20s.
But then comes the twist, and if you've read any press on the film, you already know what it is. As if it isn't fortunate enough for Scott that Ramona is actually willing to give him the time of day, even date him, Scott must vanquish Ramona's "seven deadly exes" to secure her place at his side. From the moment Scott fights the first of the exes, the film turbo boosts into a kung fu-flavored video game and rarely lets up.
Director Edgar Wright ("Shawn of the Dead," "Hot Fuzz") is a peddler of hip, pop culturally dense films for younger audiences and stacks the visuals of SCOTT PILGRIM with images straight from the video game world and from, I'm told, the original graphic novels, creating a visual disruption of a low-budget teen dramedy that is striking in style and bursting with comic gold. I don't want to spoil all of those clever little moments so I won't tell them here; I think I read about too many of them myself and found the film to be almost exactly what I expected by the time I saw it instead of being surprised by it.
SCOTT PILGRIM is not a perfect film, a fact that might slip past fans of comic books and video games for whom the film is squarely created. Like other movies where the plot (or even the title) tell you what is going to happen ("Four Weddings and a Funeral"), the plot of this film levels off once you realize that there will be a sequence of seven exes for Scott to battle. This narrative flat-line is offset somewhat by the clever and intense fight scenes themselves, but that seems to happen at the expense of character development until the very end of the film, when a nice little twist adds some punch to the main characters in a satisfying emotional way.
Most everything else about SCOTT PILGRIM, though, falls in the plus column. While older audiences might not enjoy it, the film knows who it was made for and shamelessly delivers to its demographic. At a time when younger male audiences are, on the whole, attending movies less frequently, SCOTT PILGRIM was made for them. The acting is perfectly deadpan and almost monotone in spots, something that would not be an asset to most films. But here, Cera and Culkin in particular are as dry as sandpaper, making the film's action sequences all the more cartoon-like and exciting.
And, though I've tried to avoid talking about it in detail here, the film's top selling point is its visuals. Set firmly in suburban Toronto (with jokes to prove it), SCOTT PILGRIM still manages to be as other-worldly as any great science fiction film. I suspect that if you can't be transported by the movie's whimsical visuals, you're simply too far out of bounds for the film's target audience.
For a summer popcorn film, it's hard to beat SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD, a singularly unique hybrid of the low-budget indie and a big-budget action film, a comic book film that is more "Ghost World" than "Spider Man," a video game film that is...well, this might be the first-ever true video game film. Funny and fun.
3.5 out of 4
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