When Scott Pilgrim's hit points are reduced to zero, this movie will end.
By Felicia Feaster
Movies have begun to teeter toward the kinetic, mile-a-minute logic that mimics the heart-racing pace of video games.
But with
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
, the video game has finally and definitively entered the movie realm. With its wacky graphics (guitars spew cartoon waves of sound; Asian DJs rock so hard they unleash animated dragons on the crowd), rock ’em, sock ’em gravity-defying Tsui Hark fight scenes and knowing attitude, Scott Pilgrim is the ultimate 21st century meta-text.
The latest hepcat offering from
Shaun of the Dead
and
Hot Fuzz
director Edgar Wright, the film is based on a Brian Lee O’Malley graphic novel that incorporates video game conventions. If irony and action are your drug, Wright is your pusher.
The director has erected his own personal film genre on something between spoof and homage (the spoomage?). He is committed to sanctifying the bastard, cut-rate entertainments that preoccupy late-night TV surfers: the zombie movie, the cheapo cop procedural and, now, the video game.
Part of the pleasure of the Wright Way is his immersion and secret love of whatever genre he tackles: It gives a charge of pure pleasure to moments like the one in Shaun of the Dead when the resourceful non-zombies realize they can fool the undead by walking and moaning just like them. You surrender to the warped logic of a Wright production in Shaun of the Dead, and you surrender in Scott Pilgrim.
Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a hapless man-child who seems to have little awareness that his reality is governed by the logic of a video game, which means sudden, illogical jumps in place and time, as if God were toggling around with His joystick. Scott is, in many ways, living the Judd Apatow dream: dude apartment with smart-ass gay roommate (Kieran Culkin), adorable underage Japanese girlfriend (Ellen Wong), wise-cracking sister (Anna Kendrick), rocking indie band and much female adoration. But Scott meets his game-on in hipster chick Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), whose affections come with a price.
When Scott is assaulted mid-Battle of the Bands by a crazed new waver with a Flock of Seagulls haircut and Bollywood moves, he soon realizes he will need to fight all of Ramona’s exes to win her love. Until that conceit enters the fray, Scott Pilgrim is a lot of fun, juiced up with a winking pop culture savviness about the absurdity of having an underage high school girlfriend who looks like an anime pin-up, for instance.
But once we start tallying each of the seven exes’ defeats, some of the oomph leaks out of Wright’s helium balloon. The fight scenes become a bit of a chore, even when the irony generation’s Dustin Hoffman (Jason Schwartzman, with his smirk at the ready) enters the fray, as a very Wes Anderson cool-guy nemesis and the most obnoxious ex in Ramona’s kit bag.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
Directed by Edgar Wright
With Michael Cera, Alison Pill, Mark Webber, Johnny Simmons and Kieran Culkin
Dreamcatcher Regal Stadium 14
112 min.
PG-13
