English Movie Director Edgar Wright is a thing of great beauty, his two previous movies, “Shawn Of The Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” take a movie convention and put real people in the middle of it.The former a zombie movie, the latter a cop procedural.
“Scott Pilgrim Vs The World” is nothing of the sort, it is a comic book series come to life as a video game about the bass player with a rock band fighting the woman he loves exes and around half way through it gets real old.
The problem for a music critic is
a) with eceptions, the soundtrack is up to nothing much
and
b) even the king of the nerds Micheal Cera can’t breath life into the cipheric characters.
Visually, it is a marvel, with pop ups and special effects and people blowing up into coins and so many video game visuals -when Scott says he loves somebody he gets another 2000 points for true loie (self esteem is worth 7000 points).. But it is hard to care about anybody at all.
None of the villianous league of exes he has to battle for the fair Ramona Flowers hand makes much of an impression. His friends make no impressions,… actually nothing makes much impressions.
All the band bits are relatively meaningless and though Cera is a charmer he isn’t hat much of a charmer.
So… moment for moment this is good but not much. The pity is Wright coulda killed this if they moved it from toronto to Sussex.