Guess who's back, back again? If you guessed that it was me, you win prizes. It's been a while, but even my will was no match for the call of WhatTheMovie.com.
On to the review then!
I saw Scott Pilgrim VS. The World a short while ago, and I've seen it at least four more times since then.
Now, I have to say that I'm a nerd. I'm a bit of a gamer, I collect comics, I have a bunch of action figures...you get the picture. So, by default, this film was aimed at people like me. Not only did they aim, they pulled the trigger and hit the target dead-on.
For those not familiar with the story and it's background, a short recap: Scott Pilgrim started out as a character from the comic named after it's protagonist (Scott Pilgrim, in case you're not paying attention). This comic has, obviously, been made into the aforementioned film.
We're introduced to Scott himself (Michael Cera, Juno) and his band. Then, some stuff happens (No, really, that's how it goes) and he dreams about a girl called Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Death Proof), an American who moved to Canada (Where the story takes place) to get away from her kind-of-ex Gideon.
Scott instantly falls for this girl, but soon discovers that there's more to her than meets the eye. And no, she's not a Transformer. Instead, as it turns out, she has some exes that still hold some kind of grudge against whatever. Scott has to fight this League of Evil Exes. And that's basically the whole story.
Of course there's more to it, like Scott's fake High School girlfriend Knives Chau (Ellen Wong in her first major film), his gay roommate Wallace Wells (Kieran Culkin, The Dangerous Lives Of Altar Boys), his sister Stacey (Anna Kendrick, Twilight), the other bands and more side-characters.
But, much like the graphic novel, the story has to be seen rather than explained. The general mood can't be transformed into words, but let me tell you that it is hilariously well played by the characters.
What does that leave for me to talk about, you ask? Well, the answer is a bit of special effects. The answer is also fights. Also, the answer might be video games, kind of. Here goes.
Even though the story plays out in a modern day Toronto, the world Scott lives in, whether you believe it to be the real world or his imagination, strongly differs from ours. For instance, the fights are more like the stuff you see in Dragon Ball Z than anything else, and whenever he defeats an enemy they burst into coins. The fights even have a multiplayer mode and some combos embedded in them. More examples: being vegan apparently grants you superhuman telekinetic powers, Scott manages to score an extra life, one of his enemies pulls a blue pixelated lightsaber out of thin air, and yet another enemy manages to teleport in puffs of smoke during one of the fights.
The fun part is that I haven't even given anything away with this.
The special effects, like that pixel-sword I mentioned, and the Dragon Ball fights, are fantastic. They look a bit over the top from time to time, but if you're going to let that bother you, you shouldn't watch this film in the first place. Go watch something deep and based on real life or something.
The only reason the film didn't get a full ten out of ten is because of the lead actor, Michael Cera. Not that I have any problem with him in particular, but when looking at his acting history he takes on a very Keanu-esque method of acting. In other words, he only knows one character. It worked in Juno and Superbad, but in Scott Pilgrim it kind of clashes with the rest of the story. He is the perfect Scott when it comes to the random stuff between the fights, but there's something about seeing Cera doing an in-flight 64-hit combo that doesn't sit quite right. His dorky moves while playing the bass are dead -on though.
In the end, Scott Pilgrim VS. The World is awesome. Every fight is an adrenaline fuelled sequence of special effect magic and the dialogues are delivered with a hilariously dry ennui which works perfectly considering the context of the twenty-something hipster youth of these days. I'm not kidding, they have one password at some point that's simply an annoyed sigh.
That's pretty much it, so go see it, I guess?
/Rutger
