Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

The makers of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World must have had huge grins on their faces the entire time they were making this thing. Here is one of the most charmingly loopy movies I've ever seen. It starts out as kind of a laid back slacker comedy, about early 20-somethings who play in garage bands, and talk endlessly about love and relationships - topics they actually seem to know little about. But then it switches gears into an adrenalin-driven hybrid of a comic book and a video game, where the characters frequently defy gravity, gain super powers for absolutely no reason, and villains shatter and drop coins when they are defeated.

Why does this happen, you ask? Because that's how it works in video games. And if that answer's not good enough for you, then you're probably not the audience that director and co-writer Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz) is looking for. This is a movie that refuses to be pegged under a single category. It's a coming of age story. It's a youth romantic comedy. It's a sitcom (complete with canned laugh track). It's an action film. It's about a small band struggling to get noticed. It's a hyper-kinetic video game. And all of this revolves around Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), a 22-year-old guy who doesn't have much going on in his life as the film opens, other than the fact he's dating a 17-year-old Chinese girl with the wonderful name of Knives Chau (Ellen Wong). Well, he's sort of dating her. Their relationship's in a strange place. They roam the aisles of music stores and video arcades together, but Scott doesn't seem too into it. Knives, on the other hand, is obviously falling for him. She wants him to come over for dinner and meet her parents.

There's little time for a real relationship in Scott's life, since most of his energy is devoted to the garage band that his friends and him have formed. But then, he goes to a party, and lays eyes on the lovely Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and suddenly, there's time for a real relationship. It's love at first sight for Scott, but surprisingly, Ramona's not interested in guys who use the history of Pac-Man as an icebreaker. Scott finds out that Ramona delivers packages for Amazon, and orders something off the site so that she will deliver it, and he can ask her out. His plan works, they go on a date, and things seem to be building between the two. He dumps Knives, and prepares for a life of bliss with Ramona. But bliss with Ramona comes with a hefty price. In order to have the woman he desires, Scott must fight and battle against her seven evil exes, who have joined together to form a kind of super villain league, with the bizarre goal to crush anyone who tries to date Ramona.

Why, you ask? Once again, it's probably better that you don't, and definitely better that the movie doesn't. Scott Pilgrim has a kind of infectious energy that helps carry you along with its plot. When one of the evil exes challenges Scott to a fight, the movie loses all sense of reality, and turns into a literal recreation of a video game from the late 80s or early 90s. A score display keeps track of points and combo hits, "pow" and "bam" balloons accompany each blow, power ups are granted, and Scott even picks up an extra life at one point. Each of the evil exes have powers of their own, including teleportation, super strength, the ability to summon demons, and shoot lasers from their hands. It's kind of clever how we learn about Ramona's past through her exes, which are usually accompanied with animated flashbacks. We even learn that one of the exes is a woman, played by Mae Whitman. ("I was curious", Ramona explains.)

Less this review and the film's ad campaign lead you to believe that it's all crazy action all the time, it's not. There's plenty of time for quiet and reflective moments, or scenes where Scott and his friends trade some genuinely funny dialogue. Chief amongst them are the scenes involving Kieran Culkin as Scott's gay best friend and roommate. His dry wit and commentary on the events going on in his friend's life almost makes me wish for a spin off film centered on his character. This brings me to one of my key complains of the film, actually. There are a lot of characters that make up Scott's world, and unfortunately, only a few of them are given any real time to grow. Part of this is obviously due to the challenges of adapting the original graphic novel into a two hour time frame, but a lot of the characters suffer. Chief amongst the characters who suffer, unfortunately, is Ramona. She never struck me as being as interesting as Knives, which makes Scott's obsession somewhat questionable.

This is a small complaint, and one that Scott Pilgrim overcomes with its own energy. What it cannot overcome is its overstuffed running time. It seems to be a recent trend that filmmakers seem to be afraid to edit their movies. As such, we have a lot of movies that stretch up to and beyond two hours that don't really need to in the first place. This is one such film. While it never becomes boring, the movie does drag in spots. What pulls us through are the characters, their relationships, and the overall sense that the filmmakers are going for broke here, and more often hit rather than miss. There are some big laughs here. Not as many as The Other Guys, but it's certainly no slouch.

I guess what impressed me so much about the movie was its ability to mix actual knowledge (not just referencing) of the pop culture elements included within, and the heart of the story. Yes, it has some wildly imaginative fight scenes, but at its heart, it's really just an awkward romance story about some awkward young people who know very little about love in the first place. It's a sweet movie. It's also charming, funny, imaginative, and a little bit flawed. But only a little.

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