“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” is a big warm cinematic jelly doughnut stuffed with youth, vitality, style, whimsy and other equally alarming properties. I tried to love it. But after 20 minutes, I sensed I was intruding on the movie’s love affair with itself.
Michael Cera presides as a bass-playing 22-year-old hoping to dump one girlfriend (her name is Knives) and get with another (Ramona) while fighting off the latter’s evil exes in a series of battles. Each time, the characters turn into live-action video-game figures and the screen fills with colorful captions. Fwomp! Ker-Pow!
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And ka-thunk. The (many) video-game spoofs are all essentially the same, really long, joke. As they get jumbled in with the pop-up boxes providing factoids on the setting, the scribbled words “DING-DONG” floating out of doorbells, and an animated black box that keeps popping in over a girl’s mouth every time she curses, the aesthetic is . . . hectic.
I go to the movies to escape this prevailing brain-scramble of our time. Director Edgar Wright (“Hot Fuzz”) will have only himself to blame if excited kids are so razzled and dazzled that they power on their pocket gadgets and start Prattering or Twixting, or whatever it is youth does these days.
“Scott Pilgrim” is made to be viewed on such a gizmo, one equipped with a fast-forward function. Daffy, endearing touches and quotable lines bounce and poing. Cera’s grandmaster-level deadpan — picked up by a cast that includes Jason Schwartzman, Chris Evans (who is funny, for once, as a vain movie star), Kieran Culkin, Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick — brings out the funny in an irony-encrusted script based on a series of graphic novels.
“Do you know Pac-Man?” “I know of him.” A lady who no longer loves ladies is a “has-bian.” A battle cry runs, “Die! Obviously!” And this must be the first movie to turn AOL and “Seinfeld” into punch lines indicating the presence of rusty retro.
But this ninja rodeo, this chaos prom, this pulsing grenade of irony can’t sustain itself. Burn hard, burn out. Even if it had run half an hour shorter, it would have been an hour too long.
There can be laughs in anti-comedy and random weirdness (“He punched a hole in the moon for me. It was pretty crazy,” “No vegan diet, no vegan powers!”). But hip can be a strain. (I couldn’t figure out if I was supposed to laugh because one character is randomly named Stephen Stills. Have 22-year-olds even heard of that folky geezer?)
And it takes close to 40 minutes for the plot, such as it is, to kick in. Even then, the movie just skitters this way and that, taking its time to set up the big decision about which girl Scott will choose — Knives or Ramona. But they’re both cool. Scott’s cool. Everything’s cool. So nothing matters.