Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Directed by Edgar Wright

(PG-13)

**

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For its first half-hour, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is the “coolest movie ever,” said David Edelstein in New York. This adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel stars Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim, the “not so super hero” who falls for a girl (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and must battle her evil ex-boyfriends to win her love. Director Edgar Wright’s film has a “crazy-quilt inventiveness” and a look that’s part comic book, part videogame: A kiss prompts animated pink hearts, while sounds summon descriptive text (“Ding dong!”). This is “attention-deficit filmmaking at both its finest and its most frustrating,” said Peter Debruge in Variety. Though this high-spirited movie has an endearingly “infectious energy,” the dialogue is as vapid and cursory as a text message, and anyone over 25 will find this “the cinematic equivalent of dating a high school student.” You just can’t build a substantial film around so much hollow and pointless “visual fluff,” said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. Without any real characters to root for, “any claim upon our emotions is liable to be equally vaporous.”