Directed by Edgar Wright. Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, Alison Pill 12A cert, gen release, 112 min
Michael Cera is an unfeasibly glamorous geek in this thin tale, writes Donald Clarke
THE LATEST film from Edgar Wright, director of Shaun of the Deadand Hot Fuzz, has just one notion in its busy little head. What if a pop-culture addict's mundane life was rendered in the style of his favourite video games and comics? What if buying a pint of milk caused – in the style of the old BatmanTV series – onomatopoeic exclamations to be spelled out across the screen? ( Wham! Zap! Blam!) What if each everyday antagonist came across like the final boss in a platform video game? That would be fun. Wouldn't it?
Well, yes, it is a good idea. Unfortunately, it's the sameidea that animated Wright's excellent Channel 4 series Spaced. Each episode of that show, written by Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes, crammed three (or so) twisty, nicely interwoven plots into a very busy 24 minutes. By way of contrast, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, an adaptation of a comic book by Bryan Lee O'Malley, strings a very thin story, involving even thinner characters, across two yawning hours.
It hardly needs to be said that (it being the law) Michael Cera plays the inhibited, solipsistic hero. Currently living in a windowless Toronto flat with an erudite gay pal (the excellent Kieran Culkin), Scott Pilgrim, a vacant twenty-
something, is experiencing several classes of woman problems. His current girlfriend, a decent, if overly perky Asian high-school student named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), is taking their relationship more seriously than he would prefer. To add to the angst, he has just fallen for Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a pink- haired American girl who wears, breathes and excretes insouciant cool.
Scott eventually hooks up with Ramona – somehow failing to ditch Knives – but discovers that, in order to secure her affections, he will have to defeat seven of her evil ex-boyfriends. One is a vain movie star. Another wields psychic powers that stem from pious veganism. The leader of the bunch, played by Jason Schwarzman, is a music promoter and all-round demonic magnate.
There is a neat idea buried in here. When an ordinary chap dates above his status, the beloved’s former partners do, indeed, often become super-villains of the imagination. They sound taller, cooler and more handsome than Johnny Average could ever imagine himself to be.
Unfortunately, once the conceit is established, the film fails to expand, subvert or re-invent it to any significant degree. The fights get longer and more elaborate, but the core story – the reality about which this fantasy is spun – remains little more than an unsophisticated, roughly sketched romantic triangle.
Scott Pilgrim is also weighed down by its near-fatal dishonesty. The premise of the comic and film is that the real Scott Pilgrim lives an ordinary, unglamorous life. Really? He inhabits a Bohemian apartment with a witty gay aesthete. He plays in a bubblegum rock band named (Mario Brothers fans take note) Sex Bob-Omb. He dates sharply dressed girls with names such as Knives and Ramona. The contemporary pop-culture auteur seems terrified of allowing even a smidgen of grubby commonplace drabness into his or her creations. When, 50 years ago, Keith Waterhouse created the superficially similar Billy Liar, he made his daydreaming protagonist a clerk in a Yorkshire undertakers. Billy would have longed for Scott's real life.
Such issues would matter less if Wright did not continue to exhibit such visual imagination and such enthusiasm for the possibilities of cinema. The time has come, however, for him to climb out of his mother’s basement and breathe the same air as the grown-ups.
Consider the approach taken by Sex Bob-Omb. Aware their aesthetic is (literally) somewhat one-note, the band members confine a favourite tune to a breathless 0.4 seconds. That sounds about right.
