fri 08/11/2024

Scott Pilgrim vs The World | reviews, news & interviews

Scott Pilgrim vs The World

Scott Pilgrim vs The World

Eerily youthful Michael Cera thwacks his way through Toronto looking for love

Zap! Ka-pow! Snore! Michael Cera gets Mary Elizabeth Winstead, after a tiresomely kinetic courtship

Far be it from me to complain when the eternal geek is reborn as a man of action. But perhaps I'm not sufficiently a video game kinda guy - Okay, let's come clean, I've never played one - to get into Scott Pilgrim vs The World, the inoffensively if incessantly violent romcom in which an eerily youthful Michael Cera gets to go "Ka-pow!" an awful lot before he finally gets a girl that doesn't in any actual way seem a sensible match. There are chortles to be had, and Lord knows the (English) director Edgar Wright keeps enough visual balls going simultaneously to ensnare even the most ADD-afflicted viewer.

Far be it from me to complain when the eternal geek is reborn as a man of action. But perhaps I'm not sufficiently a video game kinda guy - Okay, let's come clean, I've never played one - to get into Scott Pilgrim vs The World, the inoffensively if incessantly violent romcom in which an eerily youthful Michael Cera gets to go "Ka-pow!" an awful lot before he finally gets a girl that doesn't in any actual way seem a sensible match. There are chortles to be had, and Lord knows the (English) director Edgar Wright keeps enough visual balls going simultaneously to ensnare even the most ADD-afflicted viewer.

Scott's quest for romance requires that he lay waste to Ramona's seven far-from-friendly exes

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There's probably a PhD thesis to be written about this review. About the distillation of our critical voices such that, while you could comment cogently on the merits of a French film about Algerian refugees, you're flummoxed by a film that addresses your own popular culture. The fact that you can only address such a film with derision and high-minded condescension (I'm very sorry that you've never seen the word "thonk" before) is one thing. But you seem also to have put your own prejudices about films for the masses onto this review (What's all this about Scott Pilgrim "bulking up?" At what point is muscle mass ever mentioned in this movie?). Thank you though for the biting observation that Mary Elizabeth Winstead shares at least 7/8 of the syllables in her name with syllables in other actresses names. That is truly the stuff of great criticism. Kenneth Tynan would be proud.

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