Everyone has the right to love the relics of his or her childhood: PacMan as opposed to Grand Theft Auto, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles over Dora the Explorer, New Kids on the Block trumping Taylor Swift. But nostalgia can be as cloying as it is comforting, and there comes a time when that wardrobe of ringer T's emblazoned with cartoon characters ought to be left behind. Especially if you're a grown-up guy and you have any interest in, you know, actually sleeping with a girl.
Scott Pilgrim, the knock-kneed hero of Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, hasn't figured that out yet, and his persistent Trix-are-for-kids schtick is supposed to be charming. As he's played by Michael Cera, Scott is meant to be the underdog you root for -- you should want him to get the girl. But to get the girl -- in this case, a deadpan minx named Ramona, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead -- shouldn't he have to express some interest in her, to progress beyond moony-eyed infatuation? To talk to her, to find out what she likes and doesn't like, to avoid boring her with useless trivia that's of interest only to him, to make something other than garlic bread when he invites her over for dinner?
But Scott Pilgrim is a superhero who wears his security blankie as both a cape and a force field: His own feelings of uncertainty are all that matter, and they're the motor that drives Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, with all the ferocity of a rubber band wound around a propeller. Scott is an aimless 22-year-old living in Toronto. We'll later learn that he's "between jobs," though what he might want to do with his life is never made clear. For now, he spends his days practicing with his rock band (a suitably noisy little outfit called Sex Bob-Omb) and also happens to be dating, if only half-heartedly, a 17-year-old from a local high school, Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), who's clearly flattered by this older guy's attention and worships him and his band breathlessly.
Scott's bandmates (played by Mark Webber and Alison Pill; Johnny Simmons is their hanger-on and roadie) tease him mildly about Knives, though they realize she's a nice kid. And Knives is certainly easy to impress: She listens to Scott's stream of prattling about the genesis of Pac-Man as if it were some sort of holy text. But the woman Scott will really fall for, Winstead's Ramona, isn't so easy to please. When he first spots her -- she's a cranky beauty with a shock of fuchsia hair -- it's love at first sight. But she's not interested in his PacMan factoids. What gives? He pressures her, in a gratingly low-key way, to go on a date with him, and she relents. But as their involvement becomes more serious, Scott learns that to win his love object he must complete a series of tasks: As the result of some not-really-explained curse, he must vanquish Ramona's former paramours -- otherwise known as the Seven Evil Exes -- with nothing but his own scrawny limbs and perhaps his bass guitar.
That's a lot of exes to get through -- they include Chris Evans as a skateboard-punk movie star and Jason Schwartzman as a megalomaniacal music producer -- and Scott Pilgrim begins groaning under its own fey weight even before our hero can start slapping them down. Scott Pilgrim is based on the graphic novels of Bryan Lee O'Malley (Wright and Michael Bacall adapted them for the screen), and Wright cranks up the story's cartoonishness to insufferable levels. As skinny Scott does battle with these aggressive dudes, exclamatory remarks (Krak! Pow!) explode across the screen in Batman-style cartoon lettering. At times the action intentionally mimics the choppiness of old-school video games. Wright uses so many split-screen effects that we may as well be peering at the movie through a schizophrenic stereopticon.
Wright has made some entertaining pictures, including the 2007 cop comedy Hot Fuzz, not to mention the brilliant faux-trailer (Don't) he fashioned for the glorious Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez twofer Grindhouse. And his 2004 Shaun of the Dead has legions of rabid, zombie-like fans (though I confess Wright's wobbly control of the movie's tone left me with some reservations). But with Scott Pilgrim, Wright leaps over the line from chattery cleverness to all-out self-consciousness. Everything -- from Scott's nerdy headgear, to the way he responds only passively to the way his gay roommate (played by Kieran Culkin) continually needles him, to the way Scott's life is so aimless and drifty that he sometimes can't tell what's real and what's imaginary -- is presented with a wink or a nudge, to make sure we get the so-called irony. The movie is one big exaggerated shrug, albeit one with special effects (like the sparkly twin dragons that emerge from the keyboards of two of Ramona's exes, twin Japanese rock stars played by real-life twins Keita and Shota Saito).
Scott Pilgrim assaults us with novelty, and it's wearying. Winstead is lovely, and she looks great in an array of out-there hair colors. (Ramona is a woman who clearly feels that peacocks shouldn't have all the fun, and her fringey locks segue from fuchsia to blue to green during the course of the story.) But even for a misunderstood, tough-cookie punk moll, she's a bit too blank -- her mysterious, matte-pink Mona Lisa smile is just too enigmatic.
Yet she's a complete livewire next to Cera. I used to worry about Cera as an actor: He seemed like a talented kid in danger of being limited by his own acute boyishness. And I still think that maybe -- maybe -- smart filmmakers will figure out ways to bring out the best in him. But in Scott Pilgrim his wispy smile and quivery voice aren't endearing; they're an affront. In every frame, Scott appears to be begging us not just to love him (which would be bad enough), but to pity him.
I'm willing to suspend disbelief enough to believe that Cera's capable of playing a character with a sex drive. In fact, Juno handled that aspect of his character astutely: We never saw him trying to get the girl; we simply knew that he had, and that fact alone suggested that maybe this sweet, gawky kid was really quite something in the sack. Sex is, after all, one of life's great mysteries.
But Cera plays Scott Pilgrim as the kind of guy who thinks that getting an erection is an insult to a girl, damning evidence that he doesn't just, as we used to say in the '70s, "love her for her mind." Men and women alike have plenty of sexual anxieties. But just as men -- the good ones -- will sometimes tell us women that we don't need to be Victoria's Secret models to be sexy, men should know that they don't have to be Bruce Springsteen -- or even, heaven forfend, Mick Jagger -- for us to find them irresistible. But they do have to look as if they might possibly be interested in having sex, and that's a bridge too far for Cera in Scott Pilgrim. So what if he passes the Herculean he-man test the story puts him through? He still has all the sexual charisma of an untied shoelace. And even a woman who likes the soft touch can't do much with that.