Yeah, yeah, good fun all round. Hopeless nerd Scott Pilgrim falls for the cool new girl in town, only to discover he must battle her seven evil exes in order to win her heart, the whole a kind of kung-fu comic book manga video game beat ’em up pastiche. Kind of Tekken vs Ninja Scroll vs Juno. Very neatly done, cleverly put together, nicely acted. Likable, touching, funny, at times very funny, perhaps particularly for those of us who’ve spent more than a minute or two in an arcade in our lives. The first half really was excellent, with a deft touch on the characterisation, but they couldn’t quite sustain it. Perhaps it’s a strange criticism to make of a film that revelled in its own silliness right from the outset, but it got a bit silly towards the end. Or perhaps it stayed equally silly and got less funny. Or perhaps the silliness started to pall somewhat. Or perhaps it lost its way narratively a little, or didn’t know where exactly it wanted to go, and started to replace the inventiveness, the light touch, and the emotion with a little too much schlocky kung fu special-effect-i-fication. If the first of your battles is crazily outrageous and over the top, you do give yourself that old anime problem of where to go once you’ve already dialled it to 11. You either have to dial back, or stick on 11 knowing that you’ll get diminishing returns. After a while, 11 starts to seem like 6 or 7.
But yeah. Good fun, no doubt.
10 comments so far
Worth the money then. Good 🙂
Oh and http://xkcd.com/670/
The first half was pretty accurate to the comic, but around the third evil-ex it started to deviate. I thought the special effects and action were particularly well done but casting Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim was a bad choice. I know it would have been unrealistic, but what they should have done was film the first three volumes as one movie and then do the next three. Two hours would have been enough time to fit in all the sub-plots of the first three and a good bit of humor got left out. Of course that would have been a huge risk. Basically I’m glad it was a mediocre movie. If it was good then everyone would stampede to Hot Topic and pick up Scott Pilgrim tees and it would no longer be a cult classic. If it was bad then it would have been a waste of time. Basically mediocre is the best outcome I could have hoped for.
I thought it was very average, but then I am above the target age. There were some nice one liners but the over the top fight scenes soon got samey and I was delighted to find out the twins meant one ‘fight’ rather then two.
I came out of the cinema not quite sure what I had watched and I was restless a few times during. As an example, I quite enjoyed Salt recently, it could have been much better and Angelina was surprisingly sexless, but my interest was kept for the whole film, unlike with poor old Scott….
I really liked it but it did get a bit repetitive. And I think that a lot of that has to do with the fact that a lot of the in-betweeny character stuff from the comic was lost in order to get to the next fight.
If they had pared it down to maybe five exes the movie would have had more breathing room. But as it is I think Wright and his team did a stellar job. I think he’s a genuine talent, and HOT FUZZ is still one of the best films of the last decade.
It had parts that were great and parts that weren’t so great and so it evened out as being a decent movie. Unfortunately the bad parts were so bad that I can’t imagine myself ever watching it again. I’d recommend watching Expendables instead
I’m still waiting for someone my age to +10 years to break down all the games being referenced visually. I thought it was a cute gender-neutral date movie, but I knew nothing about the comic going in. Though I think I would give it a thumbs up just for the Arrested Development jokes, so admittedly I am biased…
I thought it was great, especially considering that it was started before the book series was actually completed. Total fun.
I don’t get the whole “I’m not the age bracket” thing. Were the video game references really that confusing? Or was it the little bit of pop punk? The kung fu? Or the fact that they were combined? I don’t understand. What was it that made you think you were too old? It seemed like it was all pretty straightforward standard boy meets girl stuff… with kuung fu and video games.
And to be REALLY honest, all of that wacky kung-fu-pop-punk-video-game stuff wasn’t even that cutting edge… honestly, it felt like the nineties: the clothes, the music, the references, it all looked like college in the 90s to me… except the kung fu… well, most of it at least. I mean, they were making Mario references, man. Mario is like 30 years old!
So, what was it?
It was shit….. Thats what it was!
the only thing I can say (since I haven’t seen the movie yet)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll7rWiY5obI
That’s a real pity, I found it to be the romance film I had ever seen. Absolutely perfect for my cultural setup.