As great as it is to make fun of legitimately silly or bad movies, which I like to do as much as anybody, they can usually be pretty low-hanging fruit for comedy. This is why Screen Junkies’ Honest Trailers series is so great. They’ll make fun of some legit turdburgers, like Fant4stic or Jupiter Ascending, but they also take aim at movies we love and agree are really great. It’s done as gentle ribbing more than all-out bashing, and that takes finesse. This week, the epic voice targets a bona fide cult comedy classic, Edgar Wright‘s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
Everybody likes to talk about how much they love this movie, but the video quickly points out how nobody went to go see it (which is a travesty, I say!) and how, like a lot of the characters in the movie, we’re all posers. It’s hipster chic to like Scott Pilgrim… we’re a snake eating our own tail here, guys. The trailer also deftly points out what a big pile of trash Scott is, how he continually whines about everything, how he cheats on all the way-too-good-for-him girlfriends he’s ever had, and how he screws over Knives—the only really decent person in the whole movie—just to pursue a toxic relationship with, as they call Romana Flowers, the “Manic Pixel Dream Girl.”
Honestly, you’d think this movie would be terrible when you rattle off the attributes of its characters… but it’s not! It’s a perfect skewering of people in their 20s who drift through life and act generally awful to each other… but directed by Edgar Wright… and based on a comic book… that is all about video games. This Honest Trailer is the perfect satire of a satire of a satire. Remember the snake from above? Now it’s been incepted!
Let us know how the Honest Trailer folks did in the comments below!
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Image: Universal Pictures
Kyle Anderson is the Weekend Editor and a film and TV critic for Nerdist.com. Follow him on Twitter!
