Scott Pilgrim vs The World

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.

But even gormlessness, no matter how sincere, can have its limits as Cera's 22-year-old Scott, a lovesick musician who plays with a band called Sex Bob-omb (!), manages to deliver fisticuffs to half of Toronto before landing the affections of his blue-haired beauty, Ramona. (That part is taken by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, whose name itself sounds like a show-biz composite: Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio meets Kate Winslet.)

The conceit, inspired by Canadian cartoonist Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novels, is a clever one: Scott's quest for romance, as ever with such things, is hard-won, requiring in this case that he lay waste to Ramona's seven far-from-friendly ex-partners -"evil exes", as the film itself rather breathlessly puts it. But Scott is also a character out of the various arcade entertainments to which he and his slacker buddies are in thrall, which, in turn, allows a would-be ennobling of the cinematic dork (and that, apparently, led to the baby-faced Cera having to do lots of press-ups). Not in a long time has there been quite as sexless a suitor as Scott, as played by the young Canadian film star who looks to this day as if he has never had to shave.

Precisely the kind of pop-culture artefact that looks destined to make bags of money and also spawn many a PhD thesis, Scott Pilgrim celebrates the blurring of reality and imagination by positing a world in which you are your own action hero. And so it proves for the eponymous Scott, who might like nothing more than to amble his way neutrally through life but must learn instead to throw a punch. There's a message not very deeply embedded here about self-respect, growing up, and the sometimes simultaneous demands of bulking up - not that Cera looks as if he has done much of that.

The movie wears its cool like a badge of pride, Wright splintering the screen this way and that and peppering the action with the sorts of verbal illustrations (some of which, like "thonk", are new to me) that I thought had died out with the Batman series of old. It's fun, initially at least, watching so unflashy a setting as Toronto be kicked into fizzy kinetic life, but it's not long before you're counting down the number of exes that exist to be got rid of. And wondering why Cera speaks so many lines in that vaguely fluty sing-song voice.

It could be, too, that the film is hoisted on the petard of its own, fairly laborious, plot, whereas a less predetermined scenario would allow us just to hang with bass guitarist Scott and his gang, who include Kieran Culkin in a slyly witty supporting turn as the inevitable gay best friend. (On that topic, the script contains a genuinely hilarious "l-word" joke.) The action sequences deserve credit, I suppose, for their democratic apportioning of thwacks sent in the direction of both sexes, as you might expect from material that includes a one-time semi-squeeze of Scott's by the name of Knives Chau (Ellen Wong).

But by film's end, you may have tuned out to the prevailing affectlessness communicated by Cera, who seems light years removed from the sharp-eyed, instantly engaging Winstead, a kindred spirit on this evidence to Ellen Page, star of Cera's career-advancing hit, Juno. Part send-up in the manner of Wright's UK-set successes Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and yet deeply serious at its popcorn-friendly core, Scott Pilgrim resembles a wild party that has gone on way too long and whose host, by the end, has become a bit of a bore. It's manic, to be sure, and also dull.

• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is on general release
• Check out the website for the Scott Pilgrim comics
  

Watch the trailer for Scott Pilgrim vs the World: