If you want something bad, you have to fight for it.
For reasons that aren't worth going into at the moment, I passed on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World when it was first released. This in itself wouldn't be so extraordinary, but a lot of other people followed my lead and it was soon branded a "major financial disappointment" (which is a polite way of saying it flopped spectacularly). Still, it managed to hang on in Bloomington for a full seven weeks (which is a lot more than this summer's similarly underperforming MacGruber can say), so since it's about to leave, I made a point of catching its penultimate screening in town.
I've never read Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel series, so I can't judge how faithful it is (or isn't), but whatever director Edgar Wright and his co-screenwriter Michael Bacall had to do to turn it into a film, it worked. Set in snowy Toronto (which gets to play itself on film for once), Scott Pilgrim stars Michael Cera as the title character, the bass player in a fledgling power trio called Sex Bob-omb (which I had no idea was a video game reference until I looked it up on Wikipedia) who's dating a high school student with the improbable name of Knives Chau (Ellen Wong). Everyone from his band mates (drummer/ex-girlfriend Alison Pill, lead singer/guitarist Mark Webber) to his gay roommate (a hilariously deadpan Kieran Culkin) to his responsible sister (Anna Kendrick) refer to Knives as his "fake high school girlfriend," so you'd think they'd be supportive when he falls for somebody more age-appropriate, but since that turns out to be the unapproachable Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), literally "the girl of his dreams," they can see the obstacles he'll have to overcome before he does.
And what obstacles they are. No sooner does Scott make his first stumbling move then he finds he has to fight all seven of Ramona's Evil Exes (a League whose ranks include Chris Evans, Brandon Routh, Mae Whitman and Jason Schwartzman) if he wants to continue dating her. Meanwhile, he's also trying to get over an ex-girlfriend (Brie Larson) who dumped him when she became a famous singer and trying to figure out how to let Knives down easy when he breaks up with her. (The fact that it takes him a while to do either says a lot about his character.) There's a lot more to the story, of course (if there's one film that earned the description "action-packed," it's this one), but it's the surface trappings -- the video game-style fights, the comic-like transitions, the brash musical numbers -- that will either draw you in or push you away. Maybe if this film had been marketed better I would have been pulled in a lot sooner, but hey, better late than never, right?