Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

Director: Edgar Wright
Starring: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Jason Schwartzman
Review: 4 stars (of five)

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a lot of fun. It’s funny, it creates a world that is outrageous in its gaming-inspired supernatural aspects and wholly convincing in its dorky-young-hipsters aspect. It’s a youthful film that, thanks to a good script and Edgar Wright’s brilliantly playful direction actually feels young and fresh.

Michael Cera, playing the squeaky-voiced naif he perfected in Juno, is a delight as Scott Pilgrim. First off, Michael Cera, carrying an action movie, even a parody, is a bigger stretch than I would’ve thought he could pull off. Secondly, his character should be really annoying. The version he presented in Juno could not have carried a film. His Scott Pilgrim has a fraction more self-assurance, and more complexity. He can be selfish and self-involved, he can be confrontational, he can be more than a falsetto milksop, yet still maintain that manchild naivete that is apparently the official depiction of the Gen Y male. The rest of the cast is right there with him. Mary Elizabeth Winstead makes love interest Ramona Flowers both as ordinary an ironic hipster as you’ve ever seen on a municipal bus and a transcendent charmer worthy of the grueling challenges Scott must suffer. Kieran Culkin, as Scott’s deadpan gay roommate and Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air and that current vampire thingy) is fun and lovely in brief appearances as Scott’s annoying kid sister.

Where the film fails is in making anything meaningful of itself. Nerdy Boy falls in love with detached, distant Nerdy Girl. Boyfriend is told that to truly win her heart, he must “overcome” her “seven evil exes.” In the logic of a film styled after video-game culture (I could call that an oxymoron, but lookit the trouble it caused Roger Ebert …), “overcome” means he has to fight each ex-boyfriend to the death in an bombastic orgy of impossible violence. That’s fun as all hell. But, come on—that’s what dating always entails, “overcoming” the scars of your paramour’s past. The film doesn’t make the silly action an effective metaphor, which is what would elevate the movie from diversionary delight to touching piece of work. When Scott learns he must not merely deal with Ramona’s past, but also his own, this attempt at higher insight and character growth is also hollow.

What we’ve got is a film that, like its characters, lives in a precious bubble and admires itself on its own terms. It also risks overstaying its welcome. It runs nearly two hours, and while each fight is different, and inventively staged, they get tiring, giving the lack of more compelling depths.

The fact that the film is what it is—video games, comic books, garage bands, so-unhip-they’re-hip hipsters, irony—and isn’t much more means that it’ll have a harder time pleasing those not already in its core demographic. But given the charm of its cast and the glee of its director and writers, they might be pleased nonetheless.