I know this might come as a surprise to some of you, so maybe sit down or something: this reviewer, a 23-year-old boy with a stupid haircut who likes videogames and comics, enjoyed Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.
You can almost see the headline splashed on the front of the newspapers now: Target Audience In Shock As Film Specifically Tailored For Them Turns Out To Be Amazing. In other news, the Pope is a Catholic.
Okay, but this film is excellent. It is really excellent. Michael ‘The Walking Typecast’ Cera gives a mean performance as dopey-but-likeable Scott, who, if you don’t know the story by now, meets Ramona Flowers after seeing her skating through a subspace highway that runs through his head, and, blah blah blah, happy ever after. The ‘blah blah blah’ bit is him having to fight her Seven Evil Exes first, obviously.
Edgar Wright has pulled off the elusive trick of ‘staying true to the source material and not making it wholly crappy’ with aplomb*. Whittling the six volumes of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series down into 112 minutes meant some of the subtleties were going to get a little diluted: the Scott getting a job storyline, the true nature of Ramona and Gideon’s relationship and the complexities of hers and Scott’s, a lot of the backstory between him and Envy Adams, etc., etc. It’s entirely unreasonable to expect all of these things to be crammed into a film for general consumption (isn’t it…?), but some of the bits that have been left in might not make any sense to those coming into this fresh – Scott’s superstitious aversion to haircuts being a prime example.
It is hard to care, though, when a film is so enjoyable and dryly funny as this. Watching the characters become flesh on the screen – Chris Evans, in a warm-up for Captain American, plays the cocky movie star who ends up exploding, and Keiran Culkin is superb as Scott’s gay room- and-bed-mate, Wallace Wells – is enough to make up for the loss of a few details, especially surrounded as they are by comic books touches, like light-up ‘Gets it!’ signs, punching people to death so hard they shed coins in their wake, and bleeped out swearing (“how are you doing that with your mouth?”).
If you like cherries on top of your ice-cream, get this: the Nigel Godrich plus Beck plus Metric plus Broken Social Scene soundtrack is exactly as excellent as you’d expect it to be. People applauded at the end of the film when I went to see it, which is beyond unnecessary, but if you’re not getting the subtle message this (and pretty much every other) review is trying to convey: this film is really good and if you are under thirty you should GO AND WATCH IT.
*Along with the trick of ‘not casting Simon Pegg in the titular role’
Words by Joel Golby
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