Rating: N/A
Box-office return is not always an accurate reflection of a film’s quality. Some of my favourites, included The Thing and Blade Runner, were dismal flops on their original release. But there are times when the audience’s decision to say “No, thanks” to a film proves to be completely right, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is such a movie. Even including overseas returns, it failed to recover its production costs at the box-office, and those came in at anywhere from $60-85 million, no chump change in 2010. But since then, it has acquired a cult around it, being called “ahead of its time.” I guess it is, providing you mean it embodies much of all that’s worst about modern cinema i.e. being a shitty comic-book adaptation.
If you want an accurate, succinct summary of how I feel about Scott Pilgrim, a comment on Reddit nails it: “Twilight for gamers”. I might expand that slightly, to “Twilight for hipster gamers.” Possibly adding the words “wish fulfillment” in there somewhere too. I mean, it was the best movie of 2010 – a year which gave us, oh, Inception, Four Lions, etc. – according to cancelled sex-pest and all-round loser Harry Knowles. Little more needs to be said. But. hey, perhaps my original review was too harsh, and it had indeed improved over the decade-plus since it came out? Though the omens preceding a re-watch were poor, such as my visceral reaction to its tag-line: “An epic of epic epicness.” Jesus. It’s nice retarded eleven-year-olds were able to get jobs in Hollywood back then.
Oh, who am I trying to kid. As the headline and most of the above makes very clear, it’s still a bad movie, one which deserved to crash and burn, doing far worse than The Last Airbender. It did not take long to be reminded of why I despise it, and as my previous opinion makes fairly clear, the main issue is Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim. My earlier hatred of Cera has dimmed slightly, along with his star (I think Barbie might be the first movie of his I’ve heard of, since this). But I still think he’s terrible, and this film doubles down on that by giving him an utterly unlikable character to play. Scott is an aimless slacker, with no useful life skills, an abrasively passive-aggressive personality and few if any redeeming features. Yet he still is irresistible to women! He’s in a band! Doesn’t need to have a job! Plays an oce-lot of video games! See what I mean about wish fulfillment for Harry Knowles?
This is just the start. We immediately get to experience the genuinely terrible Sex Bob-omb, his band. That may be the joke – except we get far too much of their shitty music inflicted on us through the course of the movie. It doesn’t get better with repetition. Ironically, the morning after watching them, I saw an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, in which the gang formed a band. Chemical Toilet are superior to Sex Bob-omb. If I possessed genuine musical talent, and was in an actual band, I’d probably be even more pissed at the depiction here. Then Scott’s dubious “girlfriend” shows up, with the ludicrous name of “Knives Chau”. What, was “Sporks Wong” already taken? Or “Teenage Oriental Fetish Girl”? This element has already been heavily criticized, and his emotionally abusive treatment of her simply reinforces Pilgrim as a top tier douchebag.
It feels as if Wright has often had a problem with women characters, which rarely come over as well-layered as the men. Their almost total absence from Hot Fuzz didn’t matter much, because of the genre. Here though, they are key drivers of the plot, in terms of triggering Scott’s actions. Ramona Flowers (Winstead) needs to be someone capable of causing the hero to fall instantly in love, and subsequently be prepared to go through hell for her. BIG swing and a miss there. Their relationship feels 100% like it exists, purely so the movie can happen, and is never at all convincing. I think this is mostly a Cera problem, since he goes through the entire film wearing the same, slightly confused expression. Mind you, Winstead is painfully generic. Not so much the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” archetype, as a bad incarnation of the MPDG. Her hair has more character than the rest of her.
Any pleasures to be found here are around the edge. One of the Culkins – they’ve largely blurred together into an amorphous acting blob – as Scott’s gay room-mate, or Aubrey Plaza, clearly preparing for her role as April Ludgate. Oh, hang on: that came out over a year earlier? So let’s not hear any more about her being an unknown, shall we? The more acidic the character here, and aware of how terrible everyone else is, the better they fare. If only Scott, Ramona and Cutlery Zhang had the same degree of awareness. Which brings me to the ending, where Scott triumphs after winning “the power of self-respect.” Wait, what? How was that ever his issue to begin with? It is Scott’s lack of respect for everybody else that has been the problem, not himself. It feels like Wright may have massively misunderstood what he was depicting over the previous hour and forty minutes.
The action sequences have not aged well either. Though I question how “ground-breaking” they were. This came out eleven years after a little-known movie you might have heard of, called The Matrix; ten after Crouching Tiger, and hell, even seven after Kill Bill: Volume 1. Seeing people flying through the air in martial arts battle was hardly novel at the time, and adding video-game sounds is no improvement. Now, they look like an over-edited mess, though the film is not alone there. The late noughts was a banner period for the hellish landscape of weed-whacker editing. While Hot Fuzz had a similar problem, the action there – and consequently the problem – was largely limited to the end. Here, every five minutes we get another incoherent sequence. Not that it matters, because there’s no tension, and barely any threat to the hero emanating from another opponent, drawn out of the film’s endless roll-call of feeble hipsters.
Reading other commentary, I frequently hear it suggested that “You need to read the comics” on which it’s based. No, I don’t. Either this is a poor adaptation of the source material. Or the original comics were shit as well. Neither of those alternatives are my problem. If a film can’t stand on its own, it needs to come packaged with a set of the source material, otherwise it’s completely fair to judge it, as is. And in the final analysis, this is very much found wanting. It’s the film on which Wright didn’t so much jump the shark, as tap-dance across it, wearing a large sombrero, and singing “I’m a little teapot.”