Yes, games and movies should stay well away from each other. Videogames make awful films. There are half a dozen ugly, grinding, Boll-standard hack jobs for each game-to-film transfer that attains adequacy. Except for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Not strictly a videogame movie (it’s based on a series of graphic novels), but it will still revive your hopes for games on the big screen.
The setup is as arbitrary as any Mortal Kombat backstory. Geeky bassist Scott (Michael Cera, doing his best awkward thing) meets Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the pink-haired girl of his dreams. But there’s a hitch to their happiness: he has to defeat her seven evil exes to date her. Each has a different fighting style and stage, leading up to the final boss played by Jason Schwartzman.
Though the mumblecore cast is never in danger of being mistaken for a group of action heroes, sharp cuts and sharper wit keep things fast and funny.
Real-life in Scott Pilgrim is like a game, with aesthetics straight out of classic cartoonish beat-’em-ups. It looks great: defeated enemies explode in showers of coins, extra lives pop up as pixelated icons, and fights feature the kind of overpowered special moves that show why polygons are so much cooler than real people.
There’s an unfailing supply of one-liners, meaning the bits between the battles are even more entertaining than the fights. If you watched director Edgar Wright’s sitcom Spaced, you’d recognize the style: clever sight gags and offhand, absurdist quotes.
The romance is sweetly flawed, even though a cynic could call it to wish fulfillment for socially incompetent boys. There isn’t a perfect indie princess for everyone, but at least there’s now a beat-’em-up movie that doesn’t make you utterly ashamed of your joystick.