Tales from nowhere very interesting

It’s not a case of style versus substance, but ends up a comprehensive victory for one over the other nonetheless. Spoilers abound – consider yourself warned.

There’s a point right at the very end of many a teen romance flick, not long after our heroine has finally captured the heart of the super-cool dude she has been chasing from the second scene in the movie, where she turns her back on him and realizes suddenly that the boy she really wants is her geeky-but-loveable best friend. Sometimes the dude has dome something to deserve this clichéd dicking around – he’s turned out to be sleazy, or shallow, or mean, so it’s ok – but sometimes, he’s a perfectly nice super-cool dude, but it’s just all about the lesson, and the lesson is this:

Settle. You’ll be happier.

The closing moments of Scott Pilgrim Versus The World have Scott making a choice between Knives – the Japanese schoolgirl he was with at the start of the movie, but never seemed all that besotted by – and Ramona Flowers – the super-cool chick he’s just spent most of the preceeding two hours fighting for. For a minute there, it looks like he’s going to choose Knives, and I am going to put this movie down as one great big long disappointment.

But he chooses Ramona. And, as well as being awesomely refreshing, it’s the only point in the movie where this really felt like the guy flick it’s been marketed as. Guys – at least in fiction – don’t get lessons about settling. If Ramona had been a horrible person, then it would have been ok for Scott to choose Knives, but all Ramona is, is risky. And what Scott has done in this movie is grow up to a point where risky is fine.

It’s this choice that does more than any other to redeem this movie: one I really, really, wanted to love, but just found myself getting annoyed at. But sadly, a moment isn’t enough.

Fault doesn’t lie with the cinematography, which is wonderful. The moonlit swingset scenes in particular blew me away with how much they looked like something out of a painting, and how much they managed to capture the exact mood of the movie at those points. The comic-booky visual effects weren’t strictly necessary (obviously), but they really added something to the style of the movie, and I think that without them, this would have been a far flatter and duller experience. Visually, this movie is over-the-top and cheesy and sometimes a little hackneyed, but it works, without exception.

And the performances are fine – if, at times, a little over the top, Knives. Michael Cera I can take or leave but he is not without his charms – the problem being more that his charms are used in exactly the same way in each and every performance he gives, and that dulls their effectiveness. He’s just Michael Cera: endearing, but a little too bumbling and ineffectual to take seriously, and it’s nice to see other characters basically call him out for that here. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is lovely as Ramona, and manages to do what she can with what isn’t the world’s most challenging role, and the support cast: eh. All either competent but unremarkable, or annoying, Knives. Also, Jason Schwartzman (but that’s a personal preference more than anything).

Similarly, the dialogue is everything you would expect from this movie as spoken by these people. Plenty of deadpan snark. Plenty of underplayed wit. Plenty of too-cool-for-school pop-culture references, mixed in with enough old-school stuff to make the whole thing feel lovingly retro.

And the thing is, all of that is fine, because that is the movie that this is trying to be. It wants to be a cool, comicky, slacker film with lots of cool music, made for a generation that grew up being sarcastic so often that half the time they don’t even know anymore whether they are or aren’t, a generation that reads comic books and plays video games and probably either are or were in a crappy band with their friends, and who get the myriad random Smashing Pumpkins references that litter this movie (which I did but … I didn’t quite understand, because yes, the Pumpkins were cool, for a brief time in the 1990’s – when these particular characters were children – but most of the credibility they built up back then has been decimated by Billy Corgan’s exploits since). Closing scene aside, I tend to disagree with the standard argument that this is a movie for the males of that generation – it’s geared toward geek, but … it’s a love story. That gives it an inherent chick-appeal.

Now, I may not completely fit the demographic, but I’m close enough to it that I can appreciate everything this movie is trying to do. And most of it, it does really well.

But.

BUT.

For such a cracking movie in every other sense, the plot just limps along. The story gets too bogged down in the fight scenes, which look really good, but often make little sense. The first fight, before Scott really knows what’s going on, doesn’t fit the story told by the others, wherein he has to actually use brains and knowledge in order to win. It’s just … a fight. That we know he’s going to win. And, as such, it’s boring. The latter fights – right up to the sixth ex – have slightly more purpose, in that at least Scott is thinking and learning and gaining confidence, but the same inevitable outcome, and each one seems to go on for much too long. I was just grateful that there was a set of twins in there, to be honest. And the final fight, nay, the whole Jason Schwartzman thing, didn’t really do it for me.

The bits between the fights were fine, I think, but once the fight plot kicked up, they just ended up feeling like the bits between the fights, and little more.

And by the end, I was just wondering why. Why any of it? Why does Scott have to fight the exes? And why is there a band of exes to begin with? And in a movie like this, where there really is no why because that’s just the plot of the movie, that’s a really bad thing for the audience to be asking.

I think maybe there’s just too much of disconnect between the breakneck visuals and dialogue – and the kind of movie that those stylistic things suggested this would be – and the strange, choppy pace of the storytelling. While I was watching it, I thought it felt really slow, but I think maybe it’s actually just too ambitious, that the source material is just too much story to fit into a single movie, and the bits that have been left out are the little bits that link the bigger bits together and carry a viewer or a reader through the story. So it’s not slow, as such, it just doesn’t flow. In any case, it all just ended up feeling a little bit cumbersome and, to be honest, I spent a lot of it just teetering on the edge of outright boredom, which was most disappointing.

Despite that, there’s enough here to like that I can’t recommend against it. I think with lowered expectations and maybe a couple of alcoholic beverages, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is probably a fun way to spend an evening. And it is worth seeing, I think, simply for the stylistic spectacle. If only that style was matched by substance.