“I don’t think overwhelming the audience is necessarily a bad thing,” opines the British filmmaker Edgar Wright. “Sometimes people get so used to bland, microwaved films, they crave to be lulled into the same pace and structure. I hope it’s a good thing if a film feels fresh and different.”
Wright is about to find out if his thesis holds true. After directing the king of all zombie comedies (“Shaun of the Dead”) and a hilarious deconstruction of the Hollywood buddy-cops genre (“Hot Fuzz”), the filmmaker has returned with “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”
This wild, breakneck picture — a cross between a teenage romcom, a superhero adventure and a live-action “Street Fighter” video game — tells of an amiable, 22-year-old Toronto slacker (Michael Cera) who falls for the enigmatic, out-of- his-league Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).
But as soon as the couple starts going out, Ramona’s romantic baggage, in the form of her seven evil exes, interrupts their bliss.
Each old flame challenges Scott to a duel to the death, the fights becoming progressively more difficult.
Fortunately, although Scott appears to be just an aimless, skinny guitarist waiting for his life to begin, he also has superpowers.
Based on the six-issue graphic novel by Bryan Lee O’Malley, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” is a singular mixture of comedy, fantasy, kung-fu and garage rock, all cranked to 11. Beginning with some truly trippy opening credits, Wright uses every conceivable tool in his filmmaking arsenal to depict the world through Scott’s contemporary, geeky, fantasy-prone eyes.
“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” also comes closer to duplicating the experience of reading a comic book than any other adaptation that has come before.
That excitement can devolve into fatigue over the course of the picture.
” ‘Scott Pilgrim’ is taking all the media young people consume and trying to find an equivalent cinematic language,” says Peter Debruge, a senior film critic for Variety. “Manga Japanese comics, video games, comic books, even the vernacular for text messages and Twitter — they’re all blended in a way we’ve never seen before, which is extremely exciting.” But Debruge also feels the relentless in-your- face style of the film overwhelms the story and characters.
“To young people, boredom is the worst possible thing anyone can suffer from,” he says. “So this movie gives you a kind of attention deficit disorder-filmmaking that throws everything at you at once. The pace is where I think the generation gap comes in. As innovative as this film is, it becomes exhausting to people past a certain age.”
“Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”
PG-13 for stylized violence, sexual content, language and drug reference. 1 hour, 53 min. Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Chris Evans and Brandon Routh; directed by Edgar Wright. Opens today in area theaters.
