For once, no one gets whacked, stabbed in the neck with a pen or beaten to a bloody pulp. For once, it isn’t that kind of ‘Family’ movie. In fact, the film most unlike anything Martin Scorsese has ever made is really the most personal of his career.

Swooping from the sky through tumbling snowflakes, volcanoes of steam and crowds of travellers, Hugo’s exuberant opening shot arrives at a pair of peering wide eyes. Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas) is a 13-year-old orphan (aren’t they all?) who lives behind the giant clock in a Paris train station in 1931.

We spend almost half the film scampering after Hugo – as Scorsese’s camera whooshes joyfully through a labyrinth of ladders, shafts, cranks and cogs – without ever seeming to get very far. He’s chased by the orphan-hunting station guard (Sacha Baron Cohen), he’s trying to fix a broken automaton left by his father, he’s bullied by a grumpy toy-shop-owner named Papa George (Ben Kingsley).

But, after about an hour of this busy meandering, Hugo finally gets where it’s going. And what’s revealed is something rather wonderful: an enchanting, funny, heartfelt love-letter to immortal French film pioneer Georges Méliès – and to cinema itself. We see how Méliès took movies to the moon and back in 1902, how silent cinema’s filmmakers were magicians who can still make us smile and gasp, and how precious things are lost between the grinding gears of technology and time.

There’s something truly perfect and poignant about using cinema’s breakthrough 3D technology to reach back into its past – and Scorsese revels in it. He shows us how the Lumière brothers’ famous Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat terrified audiences in 1895 by sending a runaway locomotive thundering through the screen in 2011. From Edwin S Porter to Harold Lloyd, from Cabiria to Fantômas, Scorsese (quite literally at one point) riffles through the history book of cinema. He’s Doc Brown, time-travelling, taking us with him.

But for a film that hangs off clockwork imagery, Hugo is way too mechanical for most of its over-cogged 124 minutes. A seat-squirming runtime, duff romantic subplots and repetitive chase scenes mean it’s never the marvellous children’s adventure craved by Hugo’s bookworm friend (Chloe Grace Moretz). Almost fittingly, Hugo’s wordless parts work best. Kingsley’s expertly balanced turn is full of buried pain and pride, much subtler than Cohen’s accent and Butterfield’s slightly tense performance, which falls short of the Cinema Paradiso wonder that Scorsese is shooting for.

But it’s easy to see why Scorsese has overindulged here. Despite being set in a storybook Paris, Hugo’s story is secretly Marty’s story: growing up watching the world through his window frame, falling in love with movies, restoring the reputation of his hero Michael Powell and becoming the patron saint of lost cinema. Moving images, indeed – but Hugo never fully manages to make them resonate.

RATING: ★★★

Based on Brian ‘cousin of David’ Selznick’s award-winning children’s novel, Martin Scorsese’s 3D debut is a technical marvel whose heart is tediously scaffolded by too many (non)working parts. But for anyone who loves cinema – who really loves cinema – it shouldn’t be missed.

Captain America: First Avenger ends with the saddest last line in blockbuster history. Chris Evans delivers it beautifully: unexpected, gentle, agonisingly poignant. But the movie doesn’t seem to notice. It triumphantly roll the credits, you walk out of the cinema wondering why your heart just decompressed inside your chest, and off we zoom to next year’s superhero-a-thon The Avengers.

Is that what this was all about? Having apprenticed in Fantastic Four, Push and Scott Pilgrim, 30-year-old Evans has waited a long time for his first franchise starring role. But in Captain American, he finds himself playing Marvel’s dullest superhero in a movie that might be a two-hour prologue for another movie.

First seen socking Hitler in the mouth on the cover of a comic-book in 1941, skinny-runt turned WWII super-soldier Steve Rogers was more of a 2D piece of US propaganda than complex characters like pre-Pearl-Harbor crusaders Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent. But right from his opening scene, Evans underplays him with quiet, surprising shades of pathos and personality.

Thanks to an amazing digital effect, Evans transforms with utter believability into a short, scrawny New York kid whose weakling health means he’ll never pass an army medical. It’s Evans performance, though, that makes us believe Rogers’ feeble body packs a mighty heart. He’s the kind of humble, earnest ordinary hero you just never see in this kind of movie – good but not goody-goody, masculine but not macho – and he’s massively likeable.

Ironically, the movie starts losing its powers when Steve gains his. Injected with a top-secret military serum that gives him huge strength, agility and healing speed, he emerges – muscular, glistening, amusingly Aryan – as Captain America. And it rapidly becomes clear that beefing-up the Cap means losing all the meat on his character. This all-American action-figure doesn’t have the powers (strength, speed, healing, a magic shield), the weaknesses (er, he can’t get drunk) or the inner pain (his problems just vanished) of the greatest supermen.

Which is partly why screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (Chronicles Of Narnia) aren’t sure what to do with him next. Suffering a similar dipping arc, director Joe Johnson once looked like an exciting junior Spielberg with the inventive charm of Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and the retro-pop of The Rocketeer. Twenty years later, he’s the journeyman who directed Jurassic Park III and The Wolfman with the same vanilla style on show here.

Embracing the pulpy vibe, Johnson keeps things old-fashioned and square – there’s no Tool on the soundtrack, like in the trailer – although dusty sepia-toned colours and deco-modern production design invokes just the right kind of nostalgia. And, in a lovely nod to Cap’s origins as a ‘40s propaganda weapon, the smartest sequence sees Steve touring America in a silly costume with a troupe of chorus girls and appearing in a line of comic-books.

Those nice early touches – Rogers busting into a superhuman sprint for the first time, misjudging a corner and crashing through a shop window – soon give way to a series of repetitive action montages in which Cap (joined by an irrelevant multi-ethnic band of soldiers) never really seems in danger from retro-techno Nazis with glowing laser-guns.

Luckily, Evans has serious reinforcements in the shape of a near-perfect support cast. Stanley Tucci can scientifically do no wrong on screen (even viz ze Jur-man ak-zent, ja?). Tommy Lee Jones probably brushes his teeth like a gruff military man. Brit new-girl Hayley Atwell feels fresh in a love-interest role that doesn’t. Dominic Cooper has fun as Howard ‘father of Tony’ Stark, as Marvel desperately synergises. Toby Jones is another class act.

But it’s Hugo Weaving who pulls the masterstroke, channelling his megalomaniac Nazi freak The Red Skull through – of all things – a magnificent Werner Herzog accent! Well played, sir. Despite a ludicrous backstory (some sort of all-powerful magical – what?), Weaving’s fiery menace gives Captain America a proper villain.

Juicy hero/villain contrasts and parallel-histories are ignored, though, and it isn’t until that tragic dying second of the movie that Captain America gets interesting. What happens when a superhero whose real power is his heart has it broken? But then it’s over and Evan’s Cap is briskly shuffled into the pack with Marvel’s box-office top trumps Thor, Iron Man and The Hulk. Oh well. See you next year…

RATING: ★★★

Publication: MSN Movies.

Two things before we start on Terrence Malick’s philosophical, spiritual, experimental, transcendent, cosmic odyssey. One: it’s shorter than Transformers 3. Two: it has dinosaurs in it. But really, where on earth do we start? Not on Earth. Not at the start. Further back. In The Beginning…

Over four films in as many decades, near-mystical US director Malick has conjured huge arthouse-blockbuster tone-poems about seismic periods of human existence like the Great Depression (Days Of Heaven, starring Richard Gere), World War Two (The Thin Red Line, starring everyone) and the discovery of America (The New World, starring Colin Farrell and Christian Bale).

The Tree Of Life makes them look like crayon scribbles on the back of a napkin.

A philosophy lecturer turned visionary filmmaker, Malick has finally gone for the big one, unpacking his massive butterfly net and setting out on a quest to capture the existence of God in Nature, the meaning of human life and the mysteries of the universe. Whoa.

In terms of crazy ambition, there’s nothing like it. Right from the start, Malick stretches out his arms and attempts to pull together the awesome and the intimate. But at first, it seems like business as usual: some lovely, drifting shots of a beautiful woman (Jessica Chastain) receiving a telegram telling her that one of her sons has died. She asks, “Why?” and Malick’s mission begins. He hits the warp button, beaming us into the cosmos and back to the dawn of Creation itself. We just lost cabin pressure…

Wondrous, mindblowing images immerse us for the best part of an astonishing opening hour. We see the universe being born. Heavenly Hubble-visions of distant galaxies. Gases, light, matter. Cells splitting. Volcanoes splurging. Jellyfish drifting. Dinosaurs. Yes, dinosaurs! Asteroids crashing. An embryo’s eye. A child being birthed.

Like we said: whoa. Created with the help of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s special-effects legend Douglas Trumbull, it might be the most audacious sequence of cinema since Kubrick’s jump-cutting giant leap from the rise of the apes to the 21st century. And to be honest, The Tree Of Life never quite touches those heights again.

Malick’s Genesis ends in the Eden of ‘50s Texas, in the town where he grew up, and where strict father Brad Pitt and angelic mother Jessica Chastain raise their three boys. This is where The Tree Of Life lays roots, as Children Of Men cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki watches Pitt and Chastain’s young son Jack (Hunter McCracken) coming of age in a series of drifting life-fragments. Very little happens, but the 67-year-old auteur’s touch for evoking the strange, magical, half-forgotten, half-understood sensations of childhood is extraordinary.

Drenched in grandiose classic music, Chastain wanders around looking at trees while Malick tries to make her look like a living angel (she even dances on air at one point) and gives her murmuring lines like, “In what shape did you come to us? What disguise? What are we to you?” Meanwhile, Brad Pitt scowls imperiously and the kids scamper around.

The Tree Of Life is beautiful. Ridiculously, rapturously beautiful. You could press ‘pause’ at any point and hang it on your wall. But you soon get the feeling that Malick could have made his film 30 minutes shorter or 30 hours longer and it would have made no difference.

His goal here is to connect the tensions within this little family (Pitt’s stern Nature versus Chastain’s loving Grace) with the giant forces of the universe. Oh, this isn’t us being clever. Malick tells us exactly this in one of the hushed voiceovers that float over what we’re seeing. There’s no story, no dialogue, no direction home.

Weighed down by its own ambitions, The Tree Of Life feels more solemn and vague the longer it goes on. We’re regularly teleported to the 21st century – for the first time in Malick’s career – where grown-up Jack is now Sean Penn, looking angsty, wandering around, not saying much, and staring at rocks.

Even if much of the movie does take place in Jack’s mind, it doesn’t really come together. However gorgeous it is, you’re often left waiting for attention-grabbing scenes (a toddler staring at a baby, kids tying a frog to a rocket) that don’t arrive often enough. You’ll feel amazed, confused, preached to, ignored, lost, found… and still Malick’s camera keeps searching.

And then it ends. But not before a fumbled finale in which everyone from Jack’s past steps out of time to hug each other on a beach like some sort of Thomson’s holiday advert.

But if Malick (and the small army of four editors who worked in the cutting room on 600,000 metres of film for three years) never wins his struggle with the film’s impossible ambitions, maybe that’s half the point. Much of The Tree Of Life’s beauty is in its yearning and wonder. It’s a magnificent grasping stretch – across space and time – to touch something that will always just out of our reach. However close it gets, it’s a captivating experience. And, you know, makes a whole lot more sense than Transformers 3.

VERDICT: To infinity and beyond… Terrence Malick’s spiritual odyssey is mystifying, unique and overspilling with wonder. Don’t wait for the DVD.

RATING: ★★★★

Published: Total Film

Love has taken a battering lately. Blue Valentine, Rabbit Hole and The Kids Are All Right have all shown it busting up, breaking down and dying hard. Love’s had it tough. Love’s had Twilight, for pity’s sake. But things weren’t always like this.

One of the most wonderful romantic fantasies in cinema history, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter Of Life And Death was illuminated by an idea so simple and so beautiful that it makes your heart beat harder just to say it: that a single tear shed for love might stop heaven in its tracks. More than 60 years later, The Adjustment Bureau swings for something just as special. That a kiss can change the course of your fate. And that True Love will find a way. On a marginally less profound level, it also proves that even if he was an angel, Terence Stamp would still scare the bejesus out of you.

Adapting Phillip K Dick’s shortie Adjustment Team, writer/producer/director George Nolfi’s genre-jumping mystery sells itself as a thriller but is in fact one of the most heartfelt romances
for some time. It starts with an accidental meet-cute in a men’s room, as hotshot US-senate candidate David Norris (Matt Damon) runs into a flirtatious ballet dancer named Elise (Emily Blunt). One surprise kiss – and she’s gone forever. At least, that was what was supposed to
happen.

But two things happen instead. Just by chance, Norris meets Elise again. Just by chance, he stumbles on the existence of an army of mysterious men dressed in grey hats and suits whose job it is to stop things happening just by chance. As employees of “The Chairman”, these unseen agents of fate keep mankind on “The Plan” by constantly nudging us in the right direction.

At this point, The Adjustment Bureau sets off on an aching, urgent surge as both desperate love story and sci-fi thriller. Pursued and roadblocked by Mad Men’s John Slattery and his cohorts – and helped by Anthony Mackie – Norris chases the woman he loves but was never supposed to meet through the streets of New York. With Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll brushing the mood between light and dark (the weather seems to track Norris’ storming emotions and the
uncertain heavenly shifts), Damon probably has as much running to do here as he did in any of the Bourne movies.

“We actually tried Free Will before,” rumbles Terence Stamp, the Angels’ dark destroyer brought in to prevent Norris from disrupting Destiny. “You gave us the Dark Ages for five centuries.” From theological metaphors to pre-determinist minefields, we’re on seriously tricky ground here. It tackles some difficult, adult questions about life and choices. Between being a president or a
husband. Between changing the world or settling down.

And for sure, The Adjustment Bureau is chock full of holes. Why doesn’t Elise ever phone the well-known Norris after the Angels prevent him calling her? Aren’t the Angels causing infinitely more “ripples” than Norris as they charge around trying to stop him? What exactly are the Angels’ powers? One minute they have amazing telekinetic gifts (knocking out phone lines, lifting paving slabs) and can predict the future (thanks to magic books that map our interweaving fates). The next minute they can’t even stop a taxi and must sprint after Damon like normal men. In fact, the whole movie is set in motion when one of them nods off on a park bench.

But if The Adjustment Bureau often feels like a long episode of The X-Files, it’s the beautiful, believable romance between Damon and Blunt that keeps us gripped. Like few other films in recent memory, The Adjustment Bureau makes us believe in a thing called love.

It helps that Damon and Blunt don’t look like gorgeous superstars. They’ve just two ordinary people who’ve both felt that rarest of sounds: click. When Elise playfully flips Norris the bird at the end of their second chance meeting, you get why he’ll never stop running till he catches her. Blunt is funny and anarchic, Damon is determined and disarming. The chemistry is perfect and Nolfi, who previously wrote screenplays for Ocean’s Twelve and The Bourne Ultimatum,
gives them some lovely, pure, romantic dialogue (“If I’m not supposed to be with her, why do I feel like this?” asks Norris, angry and hurt).

Truth be told, it’s hard to say who’ll turn up to see them. Guys expecting a sci-fi thriller will be wrong-footed by the romance, girls who’d watch the romance will try to dodge what looks like a sci-fi thriller. Take a chance – it might be in The Plan anyway.

VERDICT: ★★★

Despite wobbling under the weight of some hefty ideas while straddling two genres, this sci-fi mystery surprises by emerging as one of the most romantic films of the year.

Publication: Total Film

On paper, it really couldn’t look much better. A romantic thriller from The Lives Of Others director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. A script inked by him, Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park). A first ever on-screen pairing of Hollywood super-idols Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. Oscar-winners, every one of them.

In an opening scene that rewires The Lives Of Others’ surveillance suspense, von Donnersmarck proves his fascination with watching and listening is still ticking. A French police crew observes their target: Elise Clifton Ward (Jolie), a ridiculously elegant Englishwoman who’s being trailed by Scotland Yard because her elusive lover Alexander Pearce has stolen billions from a gangster. Jolie receives a secret note. She’s to take a train from Paris to Venice, pick an average tourist and fool her pursuers into thinking that this stranger is Pearce.

And already the problems have started. Johnny Depp isn’t an average tourist. He’s Johnny Depp. And Depp, being Depp, just can’t resist adding bizarre affectations to the character of widowed Wisconsin maths teacher Frank Tupelo. So instead of a bland everyman like Cary Grant or James Stewart in Hitchcock’s wrong-men thrillers, we get an eccentric goofball who smokes an electronic cigarette, wears granddad pyjamas in bed and seems to be fighting the urge to put on an Brit accent.

Worst still, as we pull into Venice, it rapidly becomes clear there’s zero chemistry between him and Jolie. We shouldn’t be surprised – Depp hasn’t worked as a romantic lead since he stuck knives on the end of his arms – but this is like watching siblings make out. There’s one very sweet, funny exchange – Tupelo can’t stop himself dropping the F-bomb when he claps eyes on Jolie – but otherwise the script proves much too light on wit and tension. With the police (led by Paul Bettany) and Russian thugs (led by Steven Berkoff) hunting down the hapless Frank, chases and shootouts keep the plot freewheeling, but not quite quick enough to distract from the fact that nothing makes any sense at all.

Stumbling over three genres – spy thriller, love story, romantic comedy – en route to a patience-snapping final twist, The Tourist has little except its good looks. Oscar-winning cinematographer John Seale (The English Patient) lays on endless gorgeous views of the Venetian scenery, expensive hotel suites and Jolie’s slaloming rear end. Dolled up like Sophia Loren, she swaggers through the movie like it’s one long imaginary catwalk. She’s half-right: there’s not much to care about here beyond the wardrobe.

Previously passed around between numerous directors and actors, The Tourist finally got the greenlight when Jolie wanted to film somewhere nice while Brad Pitt waited for Moneyball to start shooting. Von Donnersmarck needed a break after spending weeks in a monk’s cell writing a new script about suicide. Depp had a couple of months to kill before jetting to the Caribbean. Let’s not kid ourselves: this was a holiday and we just got sent the postcard.

RATING: ★★

Publication: IGN.

The scowl. The muscles. The senseless acts of violence.  Jason Statham IS The Transporter! No, hang on – The Mechanic! Oh, who are we kidding? By now Statham is essentially his own subgenre and Con Air director Simon West’s first film in three years wastes no time in serving up some full-frontal Stath-porn.

Within five minutes, we’ve had a witty underwater kill and – hello! – out comes Statham’s hairy chest. Looking, as ever, like he’s been injecting raw steaks into his arms, Statham plays a lone-wolf hitman who’s an expert in assassinations that look like accidents: he’ll take out the target then vanish like he was never there.

He’s the kind of man who wears a black rollneck and a leather jacket to a bar and still has wham-bang sex with a Victoria’s Secret model. Which, to be fair, is probably an average night out for The Stath.

Reduxing Charles Bronson’s 1972 genre B-thriller, The Mechanic is safely predictable but with enough pace and punch to keep jolting forward. Having been duped into whacking his mentor and only friend (Donald Sutherland, literally coasting in a wheelchair), Statham then takes the man’s alcoholic son (Ben Foster) as his apprentice. Because that couldn’t backfire, right?

X-Men: The Last Stand’s Foster (a kind of budget Ryan Gosling) is quite cool as Statham’s wisecracking, whiskey-skulling protégé, while bad guy Tony Goldwyn (brother of Paramount Studios’ president, director of Conviction) grabs the film’s standout zinger:  “I’m going to put a price on your head so big that when you look in the mirror your reflection is gonna want to shoot you in the face.”

Bravo. And if you like that, you’ll love the violence. Whether it’s concussive face-smashing (Foster brutally hurled through bookcases by a 7ft gay killer who loves Chihuahuas) or high-calibre gunishment (splatty headshots, shell-cases pirouetting in slo-mo), the choreography is bloody, brutal and believable. At one point, Statham sticks a fire extinguisher pin through his opponent’s cheek. Now you don’t get that in The King’s Speech.

RATING: ★★★

Publication: Total Film

Crashing in as a 10-tonne metaphor, Michael Bay’s deafening mega-blockbuster sees humanity attacked by a destructive new super-technology. Well, quite. Yawping a stunning new age for digital animation, Hasbro’s 60ft alien robots transform from helicopters and hi-fis in a seamless spectacle of hydraulic crank and whir, as the evil Decepticons battle the heroic Autobots for mankind’s future. Cue the in-built irony: in Bay’s world, moving parts aren’t for the actors.

Stretching back to the ‘80s for their Spielbergian boy-saves-world formula, scripters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman tap an old-school vibe kitted out with zany hackers, government agents and Reagan-era politics (“This is way too smart for the Iranians,” muses Secretary of Defence Jon Voight). But despite sinking most of Transformers’ overlong, overwrought 144 minutes into cornball comedy and hokey teen-romance between nerd-cool hero Shia LaBeouf and high-school hottie Megan Fox, Bay’s feelings are purely for the hardware. Tick-boxing racial demographics, his cast here (including Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson as US soldiers in Qatar) are simply props for ILM. And after a giant robot urinates on John Turturro in Transformers’ most ungracious mission statement, Bay at last flips the switch on a finale of breathtaking sustained chaos.

Even spun through wrecked choreography and paper-shredder edits, the groundbreaking CG effects are awesome: jets, tanks and trucks swerving, anthropo-morphing and colliding in a demolition derby of missiles, explosions and LA rubble. Joyously wreaking skyscraping carnage as if 9/11 never happened, Bay plays contemporary apocalypse for kicks. His supertoys will last all summer long, but Bay has never learnt what exec producer Spielberg always knew: disconnected from a beating human heart, even the most spectacular havoc always fades like static.

RATING: ★★★

If you watch Eat Pray Love with your brain switched on and two eyes open, there’s plenty to turn your stomach. Bon appetite: wealthy, beautiful, successful woman (Julia Roberts) with handsome, loving husband (poor Billy Crudup) decides it’s just not good enough and chucks it all away. She instantly and inexplicably pulls hottie toy-boy James Franco. Then chucks him. Then flounces round the world, doing nothing except eating delicious food in gorgeous countries. Feel sick yet? We’re not done.

She never works, never overcomes any difficult obstacles, never makes any startling personal discoveries. Finally, she bumps into sexiest-man-alive Javier Bardem. He throws himself at her. She treats him like crap.

For these reasons alone, you’d expect to think Eat Pray Love should be dipped in concrete and dropped in the ocean. But somehow, maddeningly, it’s much harder to hate Nip/Tuck and Glee creator Ryan Murphy’s film than it should be.

A big part of this is Roberts’ effortless performance, dodging your hate-bullets with amazing Matrix-like dexerity to prove exactly why she’s still of the biggest stars Hollywood has. Usually, a scene in which the willowy 42-year-old mother of three pretends to have trouble getting into a pair of jeans would have most women going Death Wish to murder her with their bare hands.

Usually. Then again, Oscar-winning master cinematographer Robert Richardson usually works for Oliver Stone, Tarantino and Scorsese. Here he’s put to work making pasta look like sex in a bowl. As food porn, it’s top shelf. But despite jetting from Italy to India to Bali (“Bwawlie,” according to Roberts), Eat Pray Love is no travelogue. Its locations might as well be rear-projection – the film isn’t actually interested in them at all. 

Worse, it’s way too hollowed-out to say anything about the indefinable ‘something’ that can go missing from a person’s life. But here we are, faced with the fact that anything starring James Franco (absolutely loving being cast as a dilettante actor), Javier Bardem (maybe still wondering why he turned down Wall Street 2 for this) and Oscar-nominee Richard Jenkins (getting paid to hit autopilot) simply cannot be all bad. Yes, that’s scientific fact. Even if Jenkins’ hippie Texan exists solely to cough up bumper-sticker life lessons that may make you want to administer his vow of silence with your shoe.

The real woman behind this is New York travel journalist Elizabeth Gilbert, whose bestselling memoir was about reconnecting with herself and the world. Swapping true sensuality and spirituality for off-the-shelf escapist cliché, Murphy’s movie is swung lazily at middle-class 30-40something women who never went travelling and are a bit bored with their lives.

Oh well. If the boys are allowed Lord Of The Rings and Die Hard, the girls should be allowed films about eating lots of pasta but never getting fat. Just don’t complain when this guilty-pleasure fantasy leaves you feeling empty.

RATING: ★★

Scott Pilgrim is a weakling, socially awkward, doesn’t drink, rarely gets a haircut, only wears his favourite T-shirts. If you just read your own bio, this is your new favourite movie. Adapted from Brian O’Malley’s comic-book saga with breakneck stylistic verve by director Edgar Wright, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is the ultimate geek wish-fulfilment flick.

There are no size-zero superhotties here, just girls who are freckled and fleshy. The good-looking guys are evil, the good guys are limp and loveable. It’s a world where chicks who don’t want to know you suddenly invite you into bed. A world where you’re the hero.

Final Fantasy? Hell yeah. Cue the plot scroll: having met the girl of his dreams – literally, as an unrecognisably dorked-up Mary Elizabeth Winstead rollerblades through a desert dreamscape – 22-year-old bass guitarist Scott must defeat her seven evil exes to win her heart. Why? No reason. It’s just a cool idea.

Proving himself a modern culture-mulcher to rival Tarantino, Wright delivers a relentless mash-up of Manga, videogames and comic-books that you’ve never quite seen before on the big-screen. Stat boxes intro new characters (Name, Relationship, Age, Rating). Word-sounds go “KROW” and “THONK”. A pee bar depletes when Scott visits the toilet. Why? See above.

Which is all very cute, but Wright’s movie only starts punching above its weight when Scott does. Ready… Fight! Before you can say, ‘Aaaaaarrrrjuuuken!’, Scott Pilgrim ka-booms with the first in a series of awesome smackdowns that dazzle with speed, style and choreography. Scott knows kung fu. Edgar Wright knows how to shoot action. Since Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz, this guy has levelled up.

Often slashing the frame into jagged split-screens, Wright’s startling visual mojo swoops in direct from Japan (the Mecca of animation and videogames) and the cine-tricks just keep coming in waves. Opponents shatter into a spray of coins. A Donkey Kong hammer appears from nowhere. Final Fantasy summons monsters battle it out in a Guitar Hero duel.

This is sizzle-reel cinema, a movie for Generation ADD that attempts to tell a story using only the cool bits. But that’s what stops it snatching a high score. Scott Pilgrim is the Scott Pilgrim trailer for two hours. Like the coin-op arcades it references so brilliantly, Wright’s gimmicky hyper-flick is too long and too repetitive. Without a compelling plot to provide a pupose, it often feels like a jumble of nudges and winks, from Scott’s Mortal Kombat-stylee final opponent to the green ray that defeats a former son of Krypton.

Breathlessly rushing around with not much to say, Scott Pilgrim is witty and clever but missing a true heart. Scott’s health-bar never really flashes red – even if he dies, you know he can always hit ’Continue’. It’s a game where there’s nothing to lose, to gain or to care about. Then again, pick-up-and-play: that’s part of why it’s such a blast.

Boosted by a terrific cast, the action scores a big power-up from ex-men Chris Evans (Human Torch as an egomani-actor), Brandon Routh (Superman as a vegan rock-god with Dr Manhattan powers) and Kieran Culkin’s aces turn as Pilgrim’s gay housemate. As for Hollywood’s geek-chic king Cera, his shrugging slacker is too much of a drip to really w00t! for, but you couldn’t customise a better on-screen avatar for the nerd-herd.

And they’re the ones who’ll decide if this fun, fizzy beat-’em-up persuades major studios to trust Wright with a lot more pocket money. He’s proved he has the ability to tap the pulse of a major pop-subculture. It might not be a box-office smash – for that, Wright will have to pwn the mainstream (film fans with good haircuts, social lives and beer in the fridge). But if each one of the world’s Pilgrims buys a cinema ticket, he could be a cult Hollywood player who’s hard to beat.

RATING: ★★★

Publication: Total Film