My Take On: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Cast
Michael Cera … Scott Pil­grim
Ali­son Pill … Kim Pine
Mark Web­ber … Stephen Stills
Johnny Sim­mons … Young Neil
Ellen Wong … Knives Chau
Kieran Culkin … Wal­lace Wells
Anna Kendrick … Stacey Pil­grim
Mary Eliz­a­beth Win­stead … Ramona Flow­ers
Chris Evans … Lucas Lee
Mae Whit­man … Roxy Richter
Bran­don Routh … Todd Ingram
Jason Schwartz­man … Gideon Gor­don Graves

This past week­end, I finally got around to get­ting to the movies and had the daunt­ing task of decid­ing between Scott Pil­grim and The Expend­ables. I decided to go with Scott Pil­grim in order to do my part in help­ing it move up the box office lad­der. Before I get into this review, I want to say that it is unfor­tu­nate this movie has not been as suc­cess­ful as it should have been. While under­stand that the movie isn’t for every­one, it is dis­heart­en­ing to see it place a pal­try 5th and drop to 10th this past week­end. Let’s get into this review shall we?

Unlike Ant’s review,  I will not go into the inner work­ings of the movie sim­ply because Ant did a great job in break­ing it down and I hon­estly have no desire to repeat things you may have read else­where. I will start off with the lead actor/hero and say right off the bat that I dis­like Michael Cera immensely, and he was one of the rea­sons I didn’t lose my mind over this flick. At the sur­face, Scott Pil­grim is yet another awk­ward young man (that you’ve seen Cera do before) but over the course of the film I saw small flashes of bril­liance from him that showed he is expand­ing his act­ing chops and mak­ing char­ac­ters his own.

Scott Pilgrim’s strengths are the per­fect mix­ture of video game ref­er­ences, witty dia­logue and excel­lent fight chore­og­ra­phy that made the film a true must see. As an action film buff I was very impressed with the tight­ness of the punches and kicks deliv­ered in Scott’s fights with Patel and Gideon in the final act.  Fights that bor­dered on the insane were believ­ably done and made you watch in utter dis­be­lief. Edgar Wright did a great job in show­cas­ing the phys­i­cal­ity much like he did in his pre­vi­ous films Hot Fuzz and Shaun Of The Dead.

I think if I watch the film a sec­ond time on Blu-Ray with­out loud annoy­ing kids and shitty pop­corn I may look past my Cera-hate and enjoy the movie more than I did. I feel that Cera’s co-stars were fan­tas­tic and in some cases stole the movie, espe­cially Chris Evans who really did an awe­some job as Lucas Lee and Bran­don Routh who con­tin­ues to grow as an actor and is a nat­ural at play­ing the smug comedic bad guy. Ellen Wong really impressed me the most as Knives Chau sim­ply because there were instances in the film where she didn’t need to speak and her man­ner­isms did the com­edy for her. Jason Schwartz­man did an awe­some job as Gideon and really made you hate his smarmy prick char­ac­ter which is a tes­ta­ment of how well he embraced the role.

I really can’t stress how much you guys should see this movie. Not only as comic fans, but in sup­port of unique films that go beyond just comic ori­gins and pro­vide a new style of film mak­ing. I would almost go as far as say­ing that Scott Pil­grim is a per­fect “comic” film sim­ply because of the fan ser­vice and the mantra of stick­ing as close to the source mate­r­ial as time allows was appar­ent from start to finish.

My Take: A must see

Rich

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