Every time someone complains that movies are just the same old crap, make them see this. Unfortunately, most people like going to see the same old crap – movies are both expensive and time-consuming, so why risk seeing something you might not like – so you might not have too much longer to see this on the big screen. But the big screen is where you should see it, preferably more than once, because there’s that much going on here one viewing simply isn’t enough.
The story is simple: Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a Canadian who plays bass in a shoddy three-piece band (The Sex Bob-ombs) and falls in love with the mysterious Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) after she roller-skates through his dreams. Unfortunately for Scott, if he wants to date her he’ll have to defeat her seven evil ex’s, and what started out as a quirky rom-com suddenly becomes something of an action flick.
The first thing to note is that this is funny from start to finish. Sure, a lot of the jokes and references are related to video games, but even non-gamers will get most of them and there’s plenty of every other kind of comedy going on here too. Director Edgar Wright (working from a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley) keeps the pace at breakneck speed, so you have to pay attention but if you can keep up you’ll notice that – for a video-game-influenced action film – this actually has a lot of heart to it.
“Metaphor” isn’t exactly something the movies do all that well these days, but this gets the idea of having to get over your partner’s past before you can move forward (and how frustrating that can be when they have a lot of past) down perfectly. Plus the fights are cool, the whole film looks brilliant, the casting is spot-on in every case and the whole thing is just plain more fun than anything else you’ll see in cinemas this year. So why are you still reading this?
Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #483)
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