What would you do for the love of a good woman? Buy her flowers every day? Sure. Go and see Sex And The City 3 whenever it comes out on the cinema? Maybe. Give up your dreams just so you can hold it against her when your once-strong relationship inevitably ends in bitter recriminations and crude accusations? Probably. So how about fighting her seven evil ex-boyfriends to the death?
Forget it. As someone slightly more famous than me once said – I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.
To be honest, I am not sure I would do he others either ? but I guess that's why I am single (no, really, I am). Thankfully, we have blokes like Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) who would, just to win the love of the quirkily-coiffured Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). And it’s a good job, as it would have been a very short film if he hadn?t.
However, the problem is that her exes are all blessed with some kind of super power. One has the ability to summon demon hipster girls, another can disappear, while super villain and creator of the League of Evil Exes, Gideon Gordon Graves, combats the lovelorn Pilgrim armed only with an incredibly smug grin. Hardly a stretch for Jason Schwartzman.
Thankfully for loser Pilgrim, a bass player for a rubbish band called Sex Bob-omb, he inhabits a videogame/Manga-inspired universe dreamed up by Eisner Award-winning graphic novelist Bryan Lee O’Malley.
Which certainly comes in handy when you are been attacked from all corners by an army of comic book baddies, who when defeated even explode into a Nintendo-style shower of coins. There are even power-ups, extra lives and even a ‘pee-ometer’.
No, really.
If you are now scratching your heads wondering how the hell a simple story of young love has ended up sounding like a Japanese schoolboy?s wet dream, it's probably best if you stop reading now. To be honest, I am surprised I managed to get past the two words ‘Michael? and ?Cera?. But I did, thanks mainly to a smart script, a superb performance from Pilgrim?s snarky gay roommate Wallace Wells, played by Kieran Culkin, and Edgar Wright?s (Shaun of the Dead, Hot
Fuzz) brilliant direction.
What could easily have become a nerd-fest is actually a very charming and likeable film.
Sure, I am not cool enough or young enough, for that matter, to understand half of the pop culture references that continually clogged up the script.
Plus, I had to look at Cera?s ridiculous face – a cross between a constipated Muppet and a comfy chair ? for over an hour-and-a-half, which, despite being beaten up for most of the film, never changed.
The Canadian actor really makes Keanu Reeves look like Marlon Brando. Winstead, meanwhile, provides capable support, but is not the kind of girl that would get me reaching for my joystick (we have already gone through this).
However, I came away from the cinema excited by a director willing to take risks. And while Scott Pilgrim will certainly not appeal to everyone, it is a shot in the arm for a genre desperately low on ideas. Even Cera, whose stuffed puppet eyes never registered any emotion throughout the entire movie, started to grow on me by the end, kind of like an insufferable mouth ulcer.
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America says
This movie is complete boatshit junk. A total, unmitigated and unwanted failure and waste of American time and money. The fake boatshit troll hype won’t help the faggot makers of this propaganda junk any.
You lose, skank boatshit.