All frosting and no cake.

Rating: Null/10 (14 March 2014)

Most actors are bombastic, pushing full-force at us with the strength of their personalities. There are a very few, however, who bring it back down to earth and act, not as a performer, but as someone who seems to be visiting the movie frame from the real world. Michael Cera is like that. He is a skinny, curly-haired, unassuming kid with a goofy smile and a look that - even at 23 - still allows him to play teenagers. There is a look in his eyes that is less confident than most of the young actors around him. In his best performances, in Juno and the underrated Paper Heart, he seems to play teenagers who aren't trying to change the world but simply to understand it.
That quality makes him all wrong to occupy the title role of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, a loud, overwrought special effects exercise that lies somewhere between an Anime epic and a hyper-kinetic video game. Hyper is just about the only way to describe it. The movie uses effects wall to wall (this is really an editor's movie), spelling out sounds behind the actors as if we are looking at the panels of a comic book. The colours blast and burst behind the actors to express extreme emotion. That would be fine if I cared about what was happening. As it stands, this is a movie with all frosting and no cake.
The story is more concept than plot. Scott's girlfriend dumped him and, in a fit of broken-hearted delirium, he starts dating a pretty girl who is five years younger and still in high school. She carries the inexplicable name of Knives Chau (Ellen Wong). That relationship lasts until Scott meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a daffy introvert who changes her hair color every week. He thinks she is the girl of his dreams, but that little illusion is tainted when he discovers that seven of her former exes - six guys and a girl - are so brokenhearted that they have formed an evil alliance to destroy Scott. Oh, and did I mention that the exes have superpowers? Yeah . . . I know.
One by one, these colourful characters come out of the woodwork, introduce themselves and try to destroy our hero. The fight scenes - and in fact most of the movie - is given over to a lot of special effects to make the movie look like a video game. The problem is that the entire production is so busy that it never stops long enough to allow the actors to build any kind of momentum. The characters are defined by personality traits but they aren't much more than that.
At the center of this chaos rests Michael Cera, whose personality is not suited for this kind of nonsense. He is a very good actor whose best moments take place when the camera just leaves him alone. His best performance came in Jason Reitman's Juno in which he played Paulie Bleeker, a gawky high school kid with an addiction to tic tacs who impregnates his best friend. That movie had moments of truth and it shows what he can do as an actor. I still believe that his best performance still awaits him. I think there is more to him than the snore-inducing sight of flying through the air and kicking someone.