REVIEW: Critic vs. Scott Pilgram

Dear “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” I think we should break up.

It’s not you, it’s me. I admitted when we first met that I’d never read Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel on which you’re based, but that hasn’t stopped me from enjoying similar films I was ill equipped to see.

I think you’re great. Seriously. You did everything right. But I’ve been told by those who adore you that at your core, you’re all about heart and love, and if a film about heart and love left me this cold, how can you be anything other than a failure? At least for me.

Your plot is certainly … unique. Scott (Michael Cera) is your ordinary geeky Toronto 20-something who plays bass in a garage band, nurses a broken heart given him by an ex (Brie Larson) who became a rock star and left him behind, is bedeviled by a younger sister (Anna Kendrick), sleeps (platonically) in the same bed as his gay roommate (Kieran Culkin), and is in love with a clingy high-schooler (Ellen Wong). That is until he meets the girl of his dreams (literally), Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a punk princess with whom he becomes completely obsessed.

There’s just one problem. To win her heart, he’ll have to fight each of her “seven evil exes” in a battle to the death (among them Brandon Routh, Chris Evans and Jason Schwartzman).

 Why is that by the way? I know, I know — stop asking silly questions. The lion’s share of your running time is spent watching Scott repetitively confront Ramona’s ex-boyfriends, er, exes (there’s one ex-girlfriend — it was a “phase”) in apocalyptic battles involving martial arts fist-a-cuffs that are staged like arcade brawls and unfold with all the video game sound and visual effects we’d expect.

I have to admit, in the beginning I wanted to yell at the screen, “Hey, Michael Cera, stop playing Michael Cera!”

But then I realized, while he’s still a limp, diffident slacker, the sort of contemporary masculinity that would cause John Wayne to blow his own brains out, he was different in that, while he’s our hero, he is morose, cowardly, self-absorbed and generally unworthy of our love or Ramona’s.

 But then, I’m spoiling the character arc aren’t I? I’ll give you this, I never thought I’d see Michael Cera as a convincing action hero, but you came pretty close.

You are the first truly hybrid film — part movie, part video game, part comic book — but does that make you a better movie? Here’s the problem: You can’t sit still for a second!

  (Does that make me sound old?)

I think you’re too schizophrenic for your own good, constantly interrupting and upending your narrative with melees containing all manner of attention deficit disorder tricks including whiplash edits, pans and wipes, manga split screens, sped up and slo-mo kung fu, guitar riffs, eardrum splitting songs (I do sound old, don’t I!), comic book sounds that come with their own illustrative words like “r-i-i-i-i-n-g,” “thud” and “woosh,” and all other manner of outlandish CGI spectacle.

On a purely visceral level, your aesthetics are dizzying and, there’s no denying,  pervasively creative and visually arresting. But you’re the natural result of a hypercaffeinated, multi-tasking juvenile pop-culture sensibility that British director/producer/co-writer Edgar Wright  (“Shaun of the Dead” “Hot Fuzz”) obviously gets too well. Sure, you’re probably the best commentary on how 21st century adolescents interact with their surroundings (and there is, admittedly, something quite valuable in that), and I confess that I like the visual metaphor for how we all must deal with new lovers’ past romantic histories, but your media-soaked worldview is just too much.

You’re very pretty to look at, but the emotional stakes never seemed very high. There don’t seem to be enough rules grounding your universe to give it any sense of anxiety or drama. Let’s face it, you don’t make much sense, and, worse, I think you’re OK with that. You work better as a cabinet of curiosities than a particularly compelling narrative. And after a while, your whiz-bang, rapid-fire comic/video game referentiality loses its fresh appeal and comes across more as a parade of tedious gimmicks. Sure, the fanboys will love you. But will anyone else?

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Cast: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, Brie Larson, Alison Pill, Aubrey Plaza, Brandon Routh, Jason Schwartzman

 Director: Edgar Wright

Theaters: Hollywood, Tinseltown, Carmike, Chapel Hills, Cinemark

Rated: PG-13 (for stylized violence, sexual content, language and drug references)

Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes

GRADE: B-