No lives remaining: "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"

Everything about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World feels rigorously cool-tested. It concerns the sexual and romantic foibles of a set of 17 to 22-year-olds, prime demographic-baiting material. The main characters - most of whom are in bands, which is pretty cool in itself - clad themselves in cool T-shirts and listen to the very coolest indie music. The director and co-writer is Edgar Wright, whose cult items Spaced and Shaun of the Dead turned nerdiness - a detailed knowledge of TV and movie conventions - into its own kind of cool. Whenever the characters in Scott Pilgrim hear a telephone ringing, or declare their affections for another, or even just plain go pee, Wright dots the screen with comic-book or computer graphics, which is perhaps a little too self-consciously cool, if typical of the whole grating exercise.

Michael Cera's eponymous hero shambles into battle on two fronts: first at an ongoing Battle of the Bands contest, where his raucous three-piece combo Sex-Bob-Omb are obliged to raise their game in the face of cooler competition, and then to defeat the seven (so-called) evil exes of his new love Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Literally so, in hand-to-hand combats styled after the Street Fighter/Final Fantasy school of console game (cool!); once bested, Scott's adversaries will explode in a shower of coins, a making literal of the disposable income a project like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World stakes its all on hoovering up. "Cool, coins!," Cera coos, the first time this happens; impossible, of course, to foresee the film's subsequent under-performance at the U.S. box office.

In Wright's defence, the film demonstrates more flickers of charm than the targeted conscience-rape of Kick-Ass. It's certainly cool around its gay characters: indeed, Scott's so cool about it he's frequently to be found sharing a bed with his gay flatmate Wallace (Kieran Culkin). Wright finds a neat use for The Other Chris Evans as a blank, posturing action star with a flunky to spray his knuckles every time he's obliged to throw a punch; and though his chief concern appears to be to get them to respray their hair any of the myriad shades on offer at the Camden Market branch of Boots, the director has an eye for interesting, sparky actresses - not just Winstead, but Aubrey Plaza, Anna Kendrick, Alison Pill and newcomer Ellen Wong as Scott's teenage sweetheart Knives Chau.

No, the problem lies with Scott Pilgrim himself: a far less ingenuous character than the casting of Cera would imply, one whose two-timing risks breaking the heart of a vulnerable teenage schoolgirl, and who manipulates a first date to get himself into bed with the rather unfortunate object of his affections. He is, I think, a bit of a twerp, something the lead's one-trick, spooked-rabbit routine doesn't go much of the way towards correcting; I spent much of these two hours enthusiastically cheering on The World, which actually counts as the underdog in any film as generally unworldly as this is. As with last year's (500) Days of Summer, Scott Pilgrim displays an underlying defensiveness that niggles away at you, an inability to deal with any emotion without first putting brackets or quotation marks around it.

Just as weedy Scott is insecure about measuring up to his beloved's exes, so too Wright seems about catching our eyes - the fact this is his first American production raises the stakes, and only exacerbates the problem. To this end, he's adopted a tone of aggressive clever-cleverness that comes across as so much comic-store pedantry and results in a screenplay that over-explains just about every other joke. It's not enough to have Pill make a throwaway reference to a fictional "Vegan Academy" - we have to cut there, to show what the film means; Brandon Routh, as a posturing rock drummer, has a riff about turning Cera to dust that goes on for what seems like days.

It's there in the direction, too. In his earlier work, Wright's whip pans and doodlings were an amusingly efficient tic - a way of cutting to the funny quicker, or highlighting a particular footnote. Here, they're all but pathological, symptomatic of the supreme attention deficient disorder that has started to manifest itself in filmmakers and audiences who need their movies to resemble console games if they're ever going to rouse themselves from their X-Boxes. If you're one of these, well, judging by its opening-weekend figures, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World clearly needs you. But that's not cool. That's SADD.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is on general release.