When Scott Pilgrim vs The World grossed $10 million at the North American box office in its opening weekend against The Expendables’ $34 million, I knew there was no accounting for popular taste. One film teems with visual invention, wit and likeability while the other features Sylvester Stallone as Barney the dinosaur; “The Inexcusables” would be a more apt title. But when it comes to audience demographics, Scott Pilgrim proves that geeks won’t inherit the Earth, just that corner of a modern multiplex filled with arcade games.
Based on a series of comic books in novel form by Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim tells the story of a geeky, possession-less 20-something bass player (Michael Cera) who dates a 17-year old schoolgirl, Knives (Ellen Wong) until he falls head-over-lower chord for the peroxide Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who has left a series of admirers heartbroken. They represent “the world” that Scott literally fights against. An old boyfriend – or girlfriend in one case – turns up. He has superpowers. Scott suddenly has superpowers. They do battle, as in a video game.
Structurally, the film has a problem – it is repetitive and episodic. Variation comes in the nature of the superpowers – Ramona has “evil exes” – as in X-Men, the Marvel comic turned movie franchise. Former Superman star Brandon Routh turns up as an ex with vegan superpowers. The Fantastic Four’s fiery Johnny Storm, also known as Chris Evans, appears as a super-powered skateboarding movie star. Scott can only defeat them by exploiting their weaknesses – corrupting a diet or stoking their vanity.
Yet for much of its length, Scott Pilgrim is entertaining. Credit goes to Shaun of the Dead director and movie-nerd Edgar Wright, who from messing with the Universal logo onwards, rendering it in 1980s video game-style graphics, is faithful to O’Malley’s visual style and the spirit of the books. Captions point out how little Scott owns and sum up characters; sound effects are described on screen. One character sends text messages in his sleep. Wright even economises with locations. Having shown Ramona where he lives with his gay roommate, Scott takes her to the house where he grew up – conveniently across the street.
Scott Pilgrim is a hyper-knowing take on a geek’s wish-fulfilment fantasy with little basis in reality. However, the film is not as knowing as it might have been. Scott may not want to sign up to a major label with his band, but Wright is happy to make a film that borders with subversion – desexualising gay and straight relationships for the purpose of normalising both – but working within the confines of a Hollywood studio picture, where the hero gets the girl. You enjoy it, but it is about as resonant as a video game. As someone who never got a particularly high score, I didn’t enjoy those much.
The best or even the most guilty-pleasurable “fugitives on the run” movies encourage a level of empathy with the protagonist. In Double Jeopardy, we really wanted Ashley Judd to clear her name, avenge herself against her scumbag husband and be re-united with her child. Salt, written by Kurt Wimmer and directed by Phillip Noyce, frustrates such empathy by making us wonder whether its fugitive on the lam, CIA operative Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie), is really a Russian spy. The answer, for a mainstream Hollywood film, is genuinely surprising, but then there are further twists that undo the un-Hollywood nature of the material – and one of those is eminently guessable.
All a reasonable reviewer can say is this. On her wedding anniversary, Evelyn is about to leave work when a Russian defector walks in and announces that the visiting Russian President will be assassinated by a double agent – Evelyn herself. Evelyn could prove her innocence by sitting it out, but her husband is missing, the significance of which is only subtly registered; you cannot be too subtle in a movie like this. She escapes and the hunt is afoot.
We know Evelyn has the capacity for good, because she goes home, picks up her dog and gives it to a neighbour’s child to care for – so much for subtlety. Yet Jolie is a rather remote presence. You want to say: “Go, girl”, but end up thinking: “Where are you going and why should I care?”
Jolie is a rather sensible action hero – she takes off her shoes when she runs. We know from the Tomb Raider movies that she can derring-do with the best of them. Yet throughout the movie I was emotionally uninvolved. The President of the United States depicted here is nothing like Barack Obama and the action takes place in a vacuum. Only the recent revelation that Russian spies have been uncovered occupying positions in high society gives the film a frisson of topicality. But the spies in real life are nothing like those depicted here.
At least the film does not have a paternal figure who sorts out Evelyn’s problems for her. Chiwetel Ejifor as an investigator comes closest to filling this role, but he’s not a compelling and determined Tommy Lee Jones-type. I should add that Salt has plenty of stupid contrivances to nurse the plot along, but not enough to be entertaining. As the title suggests, it’s a condiment without a meal.
In movies, zombies or the living dead are used metaphorically to depict an unresolved social problem. In the French zombie flick, The Horde, the undead are victims in the war on illegal migration. Nominally, it is a revenge movie. Ouessem (Jean-Pierre Martins) and three other cops plan a night raid on a deserted tower block in northern Paris, the known hideout of a predominantly Nigerian gang responsible for the death of their colleague. They aim to kill. The raid goes awry pretty quickly. One cop is shot dead and the others are captured. Then the dead cop comes back to life. Fires appear in the city outside and an army of zombies – the horde of the title – descend on the block. Cops and villains, with the help of a resident bigot (Yves Pignot), have to work together to escape certain death. But will their attitudes change?
This being the French equivalent of a B movie, a cynical outcome is inevitable. The problem with the zombie genre is that while you can refresh the subtext, you end up with a fairly familiar collection of set pieces: one zombie advancing out of the shadows, then an ambush, then a mob completely surrounding one of our heroes.
Zombie films are no longer unshakably horrific as they once were. I recall emerging from a screening of George A Romero’s anti-war Night of the Living Dead, in a state of quivering desensitisation – the monochrome aesthetic and the casual introduction of the first zombie attack created an atmosphere of grisly immediacy. Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead gave its hero a chainsaw to fight off the undead and we started to laugh. Even with its action movie plot, The Horde is a serious-minded film and does not give in to cheap thrills. But its take on the problems of illegal migrants is not that subtle. We learn the Nigerians had a tough time in the own country. However, directors Benjamin Rocher and Yannick Dahan do not debate the responsibilities of developed countries. In the end, The Horde is fairly tame. It certainly won’t whip up crowds at the multiplex.
Jean Reno, the gravel-voiced bearded star of Léon, is not everyone’s idea of a mob boss – certainly not mine. In the fact-based 22 Bullets, he is spectacularly miscast as former Marseille Mafiosi Charly Matteï, who, in the first few moments, drops his adorable moppet of a son off in town, then gets ambushed in a parking lot. And to think he only went out for a litre of milk. Miraculously, he survives. Then he sets off to find the men responsible, who are pretty much everybody who knows him.
In a film like this, you can take the story several ways. Charly could be punished for his hubris in thinking he could escape his criminal past, living to see others around him suffer. He could discover that he never really wanted to get out, even for the sake of his young wife (formerly a prostitute) and child. He could discover that criminal activity has changed beyond recognition and turned him into a dinosaur: before it was booze – now it is drugs. Or he could teach his would-be assassins a sense of honour.
Director Richard Berry, a star more than 25 years ago in Bob Swaim’s La Balance, dabbles in all of these alternatives to no particular effect. Not only did the gunmen miss their target, so does Berry. There’s no particular urgency in the storytelling, just the threat that Charly could be punished through his family. At one point – almost hilariously – he remembers his son. A subplot involves a cop, Goldman (Marina Foïs,) who lost her husband in the line of duty and whose investigations Charly frustrates. Charly eventually depends on her for help, but we hardly care. Meanwhile, Charly’s spoilt-brat adult daughter from a previous relationship becomes a major irritant.
The supporting cast includes Kad Merad and Jean-Pierre Darroussin as Charly’s childhood friends in crime, whom he pledged to defend for life. In a contrasting role from his parts in The Chorus and Paris ’36, Merad is pretty convincing as the nominal bad guy. The best scene has him complain that he cannot bring Charly’s flowers into the intensive care room, so he shows him the bouquet instead from a distance. Berry’s direction is much like this gesture. He shows you what the film could be – a compelling search for vengeance – but only fleetingly. What we are left with is a collection of not very interesting scenes that desperately require a star who (unlike Reno) can convey menace. In this “just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in” scenario, Reno fumbles around looking for his keys.
Heartbreaker plays like a French version of an American comedy rather than a film for which the US remake rights have apparently been snapped up. It owes a debt to romantic comedies such as My Best Friend’s Girl and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, which feature the destroyer of a relationship as the romantic lead.
Here, Romain Duris, best known here as the lead in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, plays Alex, a swarthy quasi-gigolo, who is hired frequently by male relatives of his “victims’” to, as he puts it, “open hearts not legs”. His purpose is to change the minds of women who are dating unworthy men and who are unhappy and do not know it.
Unfortunately, his business, aided by
his sister (Julie Ferrier) and brother-in-law (François Damiens), is expensive. He owes money to a mobster and has to take a job, breaking up the engagement of wealthy wine connoisseur Juliette Van Der Beck (gap-toothed chanteuse Vanessa Paradis) where the young woman is clearly besotted with her English fiancé (Andrew Lincoln).
The premise from screenwriters Laurent Zeitoun and Jeremy Doner, is wittily worked out and it has an attractive Côte D’Azur setting. Alex is found out by Juliette early on and has to pretend to her bodyguard. She complains about his cheap suit. (“It’s all right”, he tells himself, “it’s Paul Smith.”) Meanwhile, his sister adopts various disguises to blend in as a hotel employee. When the duty manager notes: “You’re a chambermaid, receptionist and waitress – why is this?” she replies: “I don’t know – you should give me a raise.”
There is plenty of physical comedy, notably when Alex has to deal with Juliette’s nymphomaniac friend and a hilarious crowd-pleasing homage to Dirty Dancing. Whenever Alex turns his face to camera to summon fake tears, Duris gets a laugh.
Ultimately, this is another “father knows best” story, familiar from films such as Mon Pere Ces Heros. Duris gets to pay homage to his most famous role by mimicking the movements of a classical pianist to impress Juliette and the ending is pleasing if predictable. Slightly without heart, Heartbreaker is nevertheless a charmer.
