In six volumes, the first of which appeared in 2004, O'Malley presents the funniest, most touching and most imaginative depiction of the romantic travails of a 23-year-old bass player from Toronto ever to have appeared in print. Pilgrim, named after a song by the all-girl band Plumtree, is a dreamer and a doofus, a half-arsed slacker who is handed a challenge by Ramona Flowers, the flame-haired, internet-book delivering girl with whom he’s smitten: defeat my seven evil exes if you wish to date me!
It’s a preposterous notion.
A fantastic conceit. The Labours of Hercules recast for the indie/ post-riot grrl set. Flaming swords, epic duels, theatrical face-offs: all erupting at inopportune moments in the mumbling, workaday lives of lackadaisical twenty-something drifters. Isn’t this — the outsize romance, the do-or-die elementalism — what so many of us crave in a world of humdrum hook-ups, text sex and internet dating?
Edgar Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, has a proven record for wittily fusing genre action with character-based comedy, and for marrying outlandish premises to quotidian settings. Here, in his first feature set outside England, he has Michael Cera (Juno, Youth In Revolt) play Scott, shaggy-haired bassist with struggling garage band Sex Bob-omb whose fledgling courtship of schoolgirl Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) gets derailed when he falls for New York transplant Ramona (Mary Eizabeth Winstead).
Suddenly, slacker-boy has to man up. Vroom!
At a Battle of the Bands show, the piratical Matthew Patel (Satya Bhabha, just one of the film’s adroitly sketched Asian characters) crashes through the roof to vanquish our hapless hero. Later, Pilgrim has showdowns involving the bass-playing vegan ex of his former girlfriend (Brandon Routh), skater-turned-action-actor Lucas Lee (Chris Evans), lesbian Roxy Richter (Mae Whitman), the devilishly handsome Katayanagi twins (Keita Saitou and Shota Saito), and — climactically — Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman).
With over 1200 pages of material to compress, Wright and co-screenwriter Michael Bacall have shortchanged some of the most popular and haunting figures in the books: neither Kim Pine (Alison Pill), the Moe Tucker-size drummer of Sex Bob-omb, nor Young Neil (Johnny Simmons), get much of a look in; Pilgrim’s gay roommate Wallace Wells (Kieron Culkin) is so scene-stealingly delightful he should have appeared more often.
What’s more damaging though is how little you see of Ramona. She moves — very quickly — from being sassy and aloof object of desire to a sad-eyed and mainly quiescent bit-player in the drama. She changes her hair colour a lot, but you don’t get much access to what’s going on inside her head. This is in keeping with the film’s emphasis on exuberant, capery combat scenes, but a certain soulfulness has been lost in the adaptation.
Still, there’s lots of invention and élan here, from the cute casting (Routh and Evans have both played screen action heroes), the bouncy soundtrack (much of it crafted by Beck and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich), and, in particular, the visual effects (the letters 'R-r-r-ing’ stream out of a dialed telephone; purple hearts emerge from Ramona’s purple hair when she kisses Pilgrim).
Thought it teems with pop-cultural references — to Pac-Man, Dance Dance Revolution — the film never feels cynical or citational. Partly this is due to the excellence of the casting — Cera has the sharpest comic delivery of any actor on earth, Aubrey Plaza is charmingly foul-mouthed — but it’s also because O’Malley and Wright seem genuinely to like all their characters (Graves excepted, of course). They know that just as we would like to think of ourselves as suitor-champions, we’ve all been, at one time or another, evil exes in the eyes of others.
Scott Pilgrim Versus The World is no substitute for reading the books, but, closer to Bollywood than to The Dark Knight, it’s a tonic for anyone who’s bored of comic heroes being rendered in edgy, dark hues. It understands perfectly the lunacy of being of love — how, at the same time, it clarifies and deludes, ennobles and fells us. It captures, better than any film since Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep, the befuddling, exhilarating speed at which love transports us from grief to rapture to despair to cosmic happiness — all in the blink of an eyelid.
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