SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD: Future Cult Film Vs. The Indifferent Moviegoers

Every year, Your Humble Reviewer sees at least one movie in the the­aters that fails to click with the main­stream audi­ence despite hav­ing all the ear­marks of a future cult favorite.  The top pick thus far this year looks to be Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World.  Despite the pres­ence of a cult film dar­ling in the director’s chair — Edgar Wright, who gave us the well-liked Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz — this would-be trend­set­ter just can’t catch a break.  That’s a shame because it’s eas­ily the most cre­ative and engag­ing film to hit the mul­ti­plexes this summer.

The film takes its basis from a pop­u­lar graphic-novel series, focus­ing its sto­ry­line around one Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), a slacker in his early 20’s who plays in a band called the Sex-Bob-Ombs and dates a starry-eyed teen named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong).  He’s con­tent to slack his way through life until he spots dream­girl Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) at a party and becomes con­sumed with mak­ing her his new con­quest.  He man­ages to win her over, only to dis­cover there’s a big catch involved in dat­ing her: namely, that there is a League Of Evil Exes that he must fight to win her hand.

Thus begins a series of ever-intensifying bat­tles between Pilgrim — who draws on fight­ing skills derived from his end­less play­ing of two-player mar­tial arts video games — and a series of ever-more-colorful oppo­nents. The for­mi­da­ble ros­ter of exes includes a movie star/skateboarding pro (Chris Evans) and an intensely self-righteous rock star (Brandon Routh) who draws his pow­ers from his holier-than-thou vegan lifestyle.  However, the worst foe may be the final ex, Gideon (Jason Schwartzman), who mixes kung-fu skills with supe­rior pow­ers of stand­off­ish­ness and snobbery.

The end result is a blitzkrieg-style geek epic where every scene over­flows with auda­cious visu­als and an irre­press­ible sense of “can’t believe we’re get­ting to do this” fun.  It inter­nal­izes its comic-book source mate­r­ial nicely, with the script densely lay­er­ing its ref­er­ences and gags à la Mad Magazine and deliv­er­ing a large ensem­ble of char­ac­ters and back­story info in a fast yet engag­ing (and com­pre­hen­si­ble) style.  Some have crit­i­cized the love-story ele­ments of the film for being dra­mat­i­cally weak — but that seems to be the point here, as the superhero-size strug­gles are essen­tially a sendup of the unearned melo­drama and angst that most peo­ple approach their late-teens/early-20’s love lives with.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World fur­ther ben­e­fits from strong ensem­ble act­ing.  Cera may be the lead but he doesn’t carry the film’s weight alone.   Everyone is on the same page, deliv­er­ing the kind of deadpan-funny per­for­mances that help estab­lish the film’s anything-goes world.  Big scene-stealers in the sup­port­ing cast include Kim Pine as the per­pet­u­ally sar­cas­tic drum­mer in Scott’s band and Aubrey Plaza as a bitchy scen­ester who func­tions as a sort of hip­ster “Greek cho­rus” char­ac­ter for the plot.

Among the exes, Evans does a nice bur­lesque of machismo and Routh has a blast doing a bizarro-world “evil” ver­sion of his tit­u­lar role from Superman Returns.  Schwartzman doesn’t have to do any­thing new but he eas­ily sum­mons up the nec­es­sary smarmi­ness to make Gideon a vil­lain that is fun to hate.  Winstead sup­plies the right amount of mys­te­ri­ous cool and visual appeal as the plot’s elu­sive fig­ure of desire.  As for Cera, it’s true that he’s doing the hipster-manchild schtick that we’ve become accus­tomed to — but he does a wit­tier, more nuanced vari­a­tion that gets laughs in a sub­tle way.  He’s also unex­pect­edly good in the fight scenes.

That said, the key to the suc­cess of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is Wright’s ener­getic and con­sis­tently inven­tive direc­tion.  He does a great job at bring­ing comic book real­ity into three dimen­sions, com­plete with sound effects that we can “see” and art­fully ren­dered images that cap­ture a comic panel’s mise-en-scene.  He also fuses influ­ences drawn from animé, kung-fu films and video games into a coher­ent visual style.  The fight chore­og­ra­phy is some of the best seen in an American film this year, as are the deftly-integrated CGI effects.  He also main­tains a con­sis­tency of per­for­mance style among his actors that works with his visu­als to seal the real­ity of the world it por­trays.  The end result is the most com­plex and accom­plished feat of direct­ing Your Humble Reviewer has seen this year — and that includes Inception.

It’s unfor­tu­nate that Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World has got­ten buried in the summer-blockbuster tide.  Perhaps it is too geek-specific, maybe it was released at the wrong time or it might just be one of those movies that is des­tined to find its true audi­ence on video (sadly, the lat­ter seems to be a defin­ing trend for Edgar Wright’s cin­e­matic ven­tures).  In any event, any­one who cel­e­brates schlock cul­ture — and enjoys see­ing syn­the­sized into new and dar­ing vari­a­tions — should check this film out while it’s still lin­ger­ing at the box­of­fice.  You def­i­nitely won’t be see­ing any­thing else like it at the the­aters this year.