Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a film that’s difficult to put into a genre. Its central story is, at first glance, a romance. A great deal of the dialog is comedic. But how many romantic comedies do you know where the conflicts are resolved through kung-fu matches? And how many kung-fu battles have you seen in a movie that include running scores, power-ups and visible sound effects? The term “something for everybody” gets bandied about a great deal, but Scott Pilgrim just might fit that bill. The problem with having so many of these elements in a film, however, is that some elements don’t get as much time as they should.

That isn’t to say this movie is bad. This movie is far from bad. This movie, in fact, is very good, and you should go see it if you haven’t already.

Scott Pilgrim. Age: 22. Rating: Awesome.

Based on the acclaimed series of graphic novels by Brian Lee O’Malley, the eponymous Scott Pilgrim is a Canadian bass player who’s unashamedly between jobs, dating a high schooler and mooching off of his gay roommate Wallace, who tolerates Scott because it’s fun to watch him squirm when discomforting things happen to him. Scott’s precious little life takes an unexpected turn when a mysterious girl named Ramona Flowers skates through his dreams. Drawn to Ramona’s mature and world-weary personality, Scott encounters more than he bargained for when he is attacked by Ramona’s evil exes. Like Mega Man needing to defeat a series of Robot Masters to restore order in the world, Scott Pilgrim needs to defeat a series of super-powered individuals to get what he wants. Luckily, despite being a slacker and a dweeb, Scott’s also the best fighter in the province. As for what he wants, let’s take a look at Scott as he’s depicted in the film.

Let me make this perfectly clear: if you pass up on this movie because you don’t like Michael Cera, you are making a mistake. It’s not that I don’t understand where the ire against Cera comes from. Previously, in romantic comedies, he’s cast in the role of the screenwriter’s projection of the ‘right guy’ for the girl. You know what I mean, the sensitive, quiet, intelligent and otherwise marginalized young man who’s so much better for the girl than the large, attractive, macho jerks she tends to date – a Marty Stu, if you will. Now, while Ramona has dated some jerks, and Scott is somewhat sensitive and quiet… he’s also, himself, a jerk. He knows he’s sensitive but he uses that sensitivity to milk those around him for sympathy. His intelligence is applied to remaining as free from responsibility as possible. He exists in a personal space that I think a lot of young men of my generation, including myself, have at one point or another: the militant refusal to grow up. In a way, the ‘final boss’ in the story is the kind of person Scott could become if he’s not careful – a pretentious, self-centered, smirking and completely slimy hipster douchebag.

+2 versus critics.

Meeting Ramona (very well played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead) doesn’t just change Scott’s life because he has to fight to the death in order to date her. The message she conveys to Scott and, by extension, those of us in the audience who live or have lived in that aforementioned Neverland in our heads, is as necessary as it is harsh. “You’re not Peter Pan. You have to grow up. You need to get over yourself. If you can stop being self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing you can let the good things about yourself shine through and speak for themselves; otherwise, you’re going to turn into something you hate.” Ramona also presents us with a personification of the sort of things we deal with when we get to know somebody. Their past, the people they’ve loved and lost, the mistakes they’ve made that haunt them; this ‘baggage’ doesn’t just sit around. It’s active and nearly constant, trying to keep us out of the moment and pulling us back into the past. While ultimately the battle Scott needs to have is with himself for his own sake, he also needs to be willing to fight past Ramona’s baggage in order to be a part of her future.

Now, when you get right down to it, all of this unsubtle metaphorical self-examination occurs under a surface of retro gaming references, genuinely funny comedy, a slew of callbacks to the graphic novels and some really memorable performances. Kieran Culkin’s come out of nowhere to own the role of Wallace, Scott’s smirking roommate who acts as something of a mentor. The League of Evil Exes seems to have come to life directly from O’Malley’s pages, and Chris Evans and Brandon Routh in particular seem to be having a great deal of fun in their roles, which I found quite amusing personally as I tend to think of them as Captain America and Superman, respectively. And I will admit, when the dual cameo shows up at the end of Scott’s fight with a particular evil ex, I went into full fanboy mode. I’ll say nothing more for fear of spoilers.

So here’s a picture of Sex Bob-Omb instead.

It’s not a perfect movie. Condensing six novel-length parts of a narrative into a two-hour movie means things are going to get trimmed, watered and reduced down. A few of the characters are robbed of some of their development, and even Scott’s growth towards the end is somewhat truncated compared to how it occurs in the books. Now, the books were still in production when the film started shooting, so the last third overall is different from the source material. However, I think a lot of the people who still didn’t feel any sympathy whatsoever towards Scott at the end might have been buoyed up by some of those missing experiences. Not that Scott or any protagonist necessarily needs to be 100% sympathetic in order to carry a story – in fact, Scott’s jerkass behavior in the beginning and middle of the movie drives home his need to get over himself all the more, and holds up that rather uncomfortable mirror to those of us who’ve been there.

In spite of its flaws, I really liked Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Director Edgar Wright, the man who brought us Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, really makes the visuals pop off of the screen and worked with O’Malley to ensure the characters that do get developed do so in a well-paced arc that shows their complexity and their humanity. There’s a lot of great music throughout the movie, the visual style is a quirky flavor of awesome, the dialog is smart and the fights all have a great deal of energy. The video game rules by which Scott Pilgrim’s Toronto operates go unexplained but, really, we don’t need to understand why Scott has a Pee Bar or where he stashes all of those coins after a fight. When the ex leaves him more than 2.40 Canadian, that is.

Reversal!!

Stuff I Liked: I’ve yet to see an Edgar Wright film I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed. Michael Cera acquits himself well with a very faithful and very good Scott Pilgrim. The messages in this movie are necessary to our generation and rather clearly conveyed under all the trappings of indie rock and 8-bit kung fu.
Stuff I Didn’t Like: A lot of the characters – Kim Pine, Stephen Stills, Envy Adams and Stacey Pilgrim, to name just a few – feel a little underdeveloped. The metaphors aren’t terribly subtle. I expected Scott to have a little more smirking self-confidence at first to more closely follow his arc in the books, but this is a minor quibble. And I really didn’t like how people went to see The Expendables or Eat, Pray, Love instead of this film. America, I am disappoint.
Stuff I Loved: The music. The fights. The fact that Toronto is actually playing Toronto instead of standing in for America. Ramona, Wallace, Knives and the League of Evil Exes. The playful, retro and refreshing visual aesthetic. This exchange:

Young Neil: “What’re you doing?”
Scott: “Getting a life.”

Bottom Line: Go see this movie. I plan on buying it on DVD when it comes out. Brian Lee O’Malley, Edgar Wright, this great cast and a hard-working crew have labored to produce something fresh, original and fun while other studios churn out the cinematic equivalent of a corner convenience store hot dog. You know, the ones that have been sitting under heating lamps for at least four hours? Ew. See Scott Pilgrim vs. The World instead of the other stuff that’s out there. Trust me. You will not be disappointed.

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A lot of production companies, investors and even film-makers like to assume that we, as a movie-going audience, are stupid. They think we can’t handle movies with deep characters, complex plots or themes that transcend a work and try to tell us something about ourselves. So more often than not, a movie about giant fighting robots or girls with guy trouble or unlikely partners solving crimes tend to be watered down in such a way that they’re palatable to the blandest, lowest common denominator of palate out there. Thankfully, some other projects aren’t afraid to take a chance on something smart, to take conventions we as an audience might take for granted and flip things around just to see what happens. Kick-Ass falls into the latter category, not only in that it adapts one of those comic books that looks at super-heroes from a completely different perspective as most mainstream IPs, but also in that this adaptation differs quite a bit from the book. I wouldn’t know, since I haven’t read the books myself, so I’ll be cribbing notes from critics far better (or at least better known) than myself.

Dr. Punchy Wright can hunt me down later and break my face if it really becomes an issue.

Taking cues from the Spider-Man movies back when they were still good, Kick-Ass introduces us to a teenage high school loser who is both a social outcast and an unashamed nerd. He does well enough in school to not be in the slacker crowd, he certainly isn’t a jock, he’s practically invisible to girls (which he claims is his “only real superpower”) and among his friends, to paraphrase his own words, he’s not the funny one. And yet, it’s living this kind of mediocre existence that leads him to buy a dopey-looking wetsuit, pick up a baton and start fighting crime. Or trying to. Mostly, he gets the crap beaten out of him. However, somebody with a camera phone tosses his exploits at the Internet, and WHAM, he’s a star. He’s a super-hero. And he’s getting pulled bodily into an escalating confrontation between a sadistic mob boss who’s also a family man, and a devoted father/endearing daughter team who are also sadistic costumed vigilantes.

Kick-Ass, as a comic, seems to be in the same vein as Watchmen or Wanted, taking a more cynical view of the world of super-heroism and trying to inject a dose of realism or humanity into the characters involved. Of the three, Watchmen weathered the transition to the screen the most intact, with its themes and nuances preserved in a nearly immaculate fashion. It’s a haunting commentary on the human condition couched in the deconstruction of super-heroes in general. Wanted was changed almost entirely from its comic book roots, which is a shame because a lot of the fun in that work comes from the way its protagonists behave given that they have super powers but none of the constraints of being ‘heroes’. Read the book if you want to know what I’m talking about, but what Wanted got right was the theme of doing something with your life that gets you out of the mundane things that you know in your mind are slowly killing you, but you do them anyway because it’s easier to get paid for that crap than it is to try something new and potentially dangerous. Kick-Ass also changes, ejecting as it does a lot of the cynicism from the printed page and opting for a more balanced moralistic stance. Sure, some of the stuff on screen is dark and a jab is taken at the audience’s expectations once or twice, but on the whole, part of what makes the experience so good is that it’s more interested in having fun than pointing out how pathetic you are.

As a character, Kick-Ass is aware of how pathetic he is but he doesn’t let that stop him. He’s determined to at least try to make a difference, and it leads to him being extremely endearing and a true underdog of a hero. I think that some people might overlook Aaron Johnson’s work entirely but I can’t do that in good conscience. This is a solid leading role and as much as the movie is almost stolen entirely from his character, Johnson still comes through on the other side with a performance that is one of the best I’ve seen in a movie like this since the first two Spider-Man films.

In fact, Kick-Ass is, in terms of being endearing and realistic, almost a better Spider-Man than Spider-Man was. This film made me miss those early days of Tobey Maguire getting to know his powers and trying like hell to win Mary Jane’s heart. Both his Spider-Man and Aaron Johnson’s Kick-Ass have as their core power, not radioactive webbing or gamma rays or a magical MacGuffin, but real heart and a never-say-die attitude. If Kick-Ass as a film were a more cynical work, the optimism that fuels the teenage hero would have him dead in the 89th minute, the camera pulling back from his broken and lifeless body before cutting to black as some ironically upbeat music plays.

The film isn’t without some delicious soundtrack dissonance, however, and when it comes to that sort of thing, I will be hard-pressed to name a better example than Hit-Girl going to town on bad guys with bladed weapons to the music of the Banana Splits. Chloe Moretz completely owns both this role and pretty much any time she’s on screen. She’s the Comedian from Watchmen only 11 years old and wearing pig-tails: completely aware of how damn depraved her actions are but not giving a shit because she’s slaying bad guys. She knows that what she does shocks onlookers and will leave the cops who show up at the scene speechless, and that’s the whole point. If this is what she does to folks who break the law, what chance have you got? Better put down the cocaine and turn yourself in before you end up with a balisong in the throat, boss.

A lot of critics cried out in dismay at the very notion of this little girl perpetuating and, even worse, being the target of this level of high-energy, unabashed and completely bone-crunching violence. They seem to think that sick thrills or cheap laughs would be derived from the end result. It’s like the outcry that emerged when BioWare advertised Mass Effect included sex: completely uninformed and totally wrong. No, Hit-Girl’s exploits are not played for laughs. The way this girl has been brought up is entirely backwards. She knows it, her father knows it, and the audience knows it, too. However, she makes the most of what she’s got, because railing against her father’s vendetta is only going to make things worse. She wants her father to be happy, and the most expedient way to do that is to cut a bloody swath through the people who made his life miserable. Hit-Girl is a smart, dedicated and deep down very compassionate character, even if she is violent, cruel, foul-mouthed and maybe a little cracked. She’s got more complexity than most female characters in films today, and I for one am glad that the makers of Kick-Ass didn’t pull a single punch when it came to putting her through her paces.

Speaking of Hit-Girl’s upbringing, another strong performance in Kick-Ass is Nicholas Cage as Big Daddy. His costume, performance and methodology are clearly a send-up of Batman, but his character is unconstrained by Batman’s one rule of not killing his opponents. If Batman did ever eschew that rule, it would look a lot like this. As a result, Big Daddy might be one of the best depictions of Batman ever, if that makes any sense. Cage does some things with the character that are at once fantastic and downright strange, and it’s a testament to his capabilities as an actor that are sometimes undercut by a bland concept or bad screenwriting, like National Treasure, Next or Ghost Rider. In fact, I’m going to say this right now, and I don’t care who knows it: I like Nicholas Cage. I think he’s talented and I enjoy watching him on-screen, even if I’m laughing at his ass. Half the crap he does isn’t necessarily his fault, and even when he’s off, he’s still memorable. I like him. There. I said it.

In terms of the rest of the production, Christopher Mintz-Plasse may surprise some of the fans of McLovin in his turn as a fellow comic-book fan donning a costume and calling himself Red Mist. It’s part of a plot that works very well and hums along without losing the audience, bolstered by the musical choices in both soundtrack and score. The film isn’t perfect, as the low budget shows in places and sometimes the film seems to have a bit of filler here and there, but it never gets in the way of the movie being fun. I get the feeling that a lot of the look and feel of the movie comes right out of the comics, and as much as the blacker portions of the story and theme have been left behind, the result still manages to take a jab at us as the audience as much as it puts its characters through the wringer. Like the changes made to Watchmen, my suspicion is that Matthew Vaughn and company kept to the spirit of the work while changing things up a bit to make the story a bit more suited for the silver screen.

Regardless of all of that, Kick-Ass kicks ass. Provided you’re a fan of super-heroes and not put off by the sort of hyper-realized violence that would be right at home in a Sam Peckinpah or Paul Verhoven flick, it belongs on your Netflix queue if not your DVD shelf. It’s a brutal, no-holds-barred, steel-toed-boot-to-the-crotch-while-laughing-all-the-while action comedy that has no fear, no hesitation and no limits. It’s a roller coaster through a demented carnival of bright costumes and gushing blood that occasionally smacks you in the face with a water balloon with profanity scribbled all over it in Sharpie.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.

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Back in the days of the late 80s and early 90s, when the excess of the previous decade were giving way to the ‘edgy’ goth culture that emerged to dominate a lot of the media in the next – The Crow, Spawn, A Nightmare Before Christmas, etc – America was getting its first real dose of animé. The Sci-Fi Channel, back when it was called ‘The Sci-Fi Channel’ and didn’t worry about its Google page rank because, well, Google didn’t really exist yet, ran a few animé features every year or so just to whet our whistles for what lay in store for us on the other side of the Pacific. The first round included Lensman, Casshan Robot Hunter and Vampire Hunter D, which while visually stunning and unique in their aesthetics, amounted to pretty standard but well-done action flicks. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that we were introduced to the truly introspective and headspace-violating works such as Akira and this week’s review fodder, Ghost in the Shell.

There’s also the fact that none of those three ‘early’ animé features are available on Netflix, which is a shame because Lensman is a great reworking of E.E. Smith’s novels, Casshan is one of the best treatments of a Mega Man-style protagonist I’ve ever seen, and Vampire Hunter D is… hmm? Oh, right, Ghost in the Shell, sorry about that.

The year is 2029. The world is connected by a global information network that is to the Internet what a Peterbilt 378 is to last year’s Ford pick-up. In Tokyo, the government has divided its various responsibilities into sections, and Section 9 is their covert operations and network security division. Top badass amongst the ranks of Section 9 is Major Motoko Kusanagi, who along with being a crack shot, an expert martial artist and pretty damn smart in terms of both brain and mouth, is also a full conversion cyborg, meaning that other than her brain and most of her spinal column, her body is entirely robotic. A case involving a hacker called ‘the Puppet Master’ falls into Section 9′s lap, and the investigation leads Motoko to question the nature of her own existence even as she tries to unravel the mystery as to who this hacker is and what they’re after.

Ghost in the Shell, like a great deal of animé, is based upon the manga of the same name. The manga was crafted by a guy named Shirow Masamune, and in the interest of full disclosure, I need to make the following statement: I love Shirow Masamune. This is the guy who brought us Black Magic, Appleseed and Dominion, which might be better known by the animé feature called Tank Police. His work is, in my opinion, best described as ‘camp cyberpunk’, a marriage of the mentality behind such works as Blade Runner and Snow Crash with balls-to-the-wall action and genuinely funny humor that has mechanized characters like Briareos from Appleseed acting far more human than some humans do in similar works, even his own. There’s plenty of philosophy, sociological commentary and bits of political satire woven into his stories, and they’re told and drawn well enough that you’re having just as good a time contemplating what he’s trying to say as you do watching cops with tanks blast their way through the bad guys. Ghost in the Shell is exemplary of this style, with discussions on the nature of human existence occurring almost simultaneously with cybernetic supercops doing battle against advanced walking tanks.

The big guy’s Battou. He’s awesome.
He gives us the phrase ‘standard-issue big gun’ among other things.

The action from the manga exists almost intact in the animé feature. Instead of trying to wow an audience with laser guns or giant fighting robots, Ghost in the Shell keeps the action, for the most part, on the human level. While the Major is super-strong, very fast and well-experienced in combat, when the action takes place it happens on a scale to which an audience can relate. I mean, seeing a space battle happen in, say, Star Blazers or Robotech is exciting, but a great deal of that comes from our relationship with the pilots of those fantastic vehicles. Without characters that we like and can relate to, it’d just be so much sound and fury like the opening of Revenge of the Sith. The grounding of Tokyo 2029 in reality, coupled with the interesting characters involved in the combat, lends it weight and makes it more exciting, ramping up the tension as the stakes get higher.

Unfortunately Ghost in the Shell doesn’t have the pace or the occasional tongue-in-cheek aside of its manga source material. Some bits of the film just drag, especially when it comes to Motoko’s navel-gazing. It’s like watching a tense episode of Law & Order: SVU only to have Stabler & Benson stop in the middle of tracking down a serial rapist to discuss the sustainability of the world in general and New York City in particular. It’s interesting, sure, but we didn’t come here for moral philosophy, get the hell on with the detective work. Instead of weaving these questions into the narrative, director Oshii Mamoru stops the action dead to have us ruminate on the nature of human existence.

There’s also the fact that the Major inexplicably gets naked any time she needs to use her cloaking device. “Therm-optic camouflage” didn’t require nudity in the manga, and even in the film a guy is able to use therm-optics just by pulling up the hood of his jumper – he didn’t have to whip out his junk to turn invisible. I don’t object to the idea of seeing Motoko in her skivvies, even if she is a cyborg, but the gratuity and lack of necessity for it in context kind of bugs me.

Sad cyborg is sad.

Ghost in the Shell was ground-breaking for its time. Now, “ground-breaking” is not entirely synonymous with “good”. It’s also a phrase that can get abused by people in the marketing world. Sonic Unleashed, for example, could be described as ground-breaking in that video game series because never before as a hedgehog that runs fast turned into a hulking fur-covered pile of rage and sharp bits that’d be called a ‘werewolf’ if it weren’t a complete misnomer. The DaVinci Code broke new ground for anti-Church conspiracy theorists, but the book is at its best when it’s wedged under a piece of furniture to keep it from wobbling. Twilight was ground-breaking in both its existence as genre fiction aimed at young female readers and the psychological and sexual implications of its characters, but it seemed like the flat characterizations and plodding story pace were set to drain vampires of all of their menace and mystique until the advent of Daybreakers. Incidentally, one has to wonder the fun that could be had if the aforementioned vampire hunter D came across the Cullen household. Hilarity would ensue, I’m sure.

Anyway, Ghost in the Shell is not only a ground-breaking work in terms of cyberpunk animé and post-modern information-age personal philosophy but also pretty damn good as a story. Long treatises and monologues aside, this is a seminal work of the genre and definitely worth seeing if you have any interest in well-done hand-crafted animation that isn’t afraid to be violent, sexy or intellectually interesting for adults. The thing about the film which ultimately works against it is, as good as Shirow’s work is, it tends to be dense, with layers of philosophical and socio-political commentary layered between the character development and action sequences. It’s a similar problem that we have with the recent adaptation of Appleseed, and I suspect that if Black Magic or Dominion were to be revisited as films, it’d be no different. Trying to cram everything Shirow does in his works into a two hour film without a careful hand in the editing process can leave the final result feeling disjointed and lead to some problems with pace. Ghost in the Shell is pretty much the best example of this, but it’s also a fantastic example of the counterpoint to the problem with adapting Shirow’s work to film.

Even today, scenes like this are gorgeous.

Even when there isn’t anything going on, it’s extremely well-drawn or well-rendered nothing. Even if you’re not an animé fan and just have a passing interest in things like cyberpunk action, artificial intelligence that doesn’t want to destroy the world or just characters that are both intelligent and badass, you can do a hell of a lot worse than Ghost in the Shell. And if you like it as a feature, go read the manga or, better yet, check out Stand-Alone Complex, an animé television series that stays a lot closer to Shirow’s original vision. You can expand on a lot of the themes and subjects in those inner layers when you have a dozen hour-long episodes to work with instead of a feature with a ninety minute running time. I mean, imagine if you tried to take one of the many, many themes from a tv series like Star Trek: The Next Generation, let’s say relocating a native population for the sake of governmental whims, and condense it into a feature film that’s accessible to the masses as well as diehard fans. The result would probably be a total disaster! I mean, who would be so stupid as to…

…Wait…

Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.

This is an interesting position for me to be in. It seems that last week’s review of Avatar had some people wondering what movie I’d actually seen, since I didn’t instantly fall in love with Pandora, nor did I gas myself into oblivion to be reincarnated as a Na’vi.

…Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but still, a few folks at the Escapist thought I was mistaken in drawing a comparison between James Cameron’s latest money machine and a little film from last year called District 9. They further didn’t seem to get why I considered District 9 a better film, since it too is a sci-fi action drama with a message and a unique alien race never before seen by humans. I was going to fire up District 9 on the Netflix Instant Queue because I couldn’t think of a better way to spend an evening than streaming a film this good directly into my eye sockets, but someone very astute pointed out I’d already reviewed District 9 and while I haven’t given it the ICFN treatment, I’d just be repeating myself for the most part.

But you know what we haven’t had in a while? A cage match.

So let’s toss these two into the mix together and see which emerges victorious. I will attempt to remain as objective as possible for the benefit of all you Avatar fans out there.

Let Mortal Kombat begin!

I’ve discussed Assassin’s Creed previously, though not at any significant length. I couldn’t even call what I said a ‘review’ with any fairness, since I only played a bit of the game. There were a few things I liked about the first game, such as the environments, the framing element of the story and the stealth-focused means of assassinating people pretending to be pious. However, the seemingly shameless padding of always restarting from the top of Alamut, doing a specific set of tasks to gather intelligence and the inevitable rousing of Desmond from his recollections of his time as Altair for some exposition dispensed in the somewhat bland near-future setting. The sequel of that game begins by sneaking up behind those elements, breaking their necks and tossing them from the nearest balcony.

Sam Fisher wishes he looked this good.

Assassin’s Creed II begins with Desmond being liberated from the laboratory of Abstergo Industries where Dr Breen Vidic has held him hostage. Kristen Bell Lucy orchestrates this liberation and takes him to a secret hideout where a snarky British bookworm and a relatively cute tech-inclined girl have assembled an “improved” version of the Animus device that took Desmond back in time to relive Altair’s memories. This time, they need him to enter the persona of a different ancestor, in order to actually learn assassin skills rather than just watching them happen. The ancestor in question is one Ezio Auditore de Firenze, and if I’m honest, he very quickly became one of my favorite video game protagonists of recent memory.

When we first meet Ezio as a young man, he’s a brash, carefree, womanizing and somewhat selfish rich kid. But he’s also charming, handsome, cares about his family and isn’t unintelligent or dull. The setting of the game, Italy during the Renaissance, is incredibly immersive, partially because of the painstakingly rendered cities and partially because of the voice acting. Maybe it’s the talent and maybe it’s the Italian, but the passion of these characters comes through the pixels very easily and pulls the player in almost immediately. The characters aren’t quite as realistically rendered as in, say, Dragon Age, but it’s rare to see the characters in Assassin’s Creed II come down with the “BioWare face”.

The point to this is that Ezio exhibits growth, which I really appreciated. The young man we meet when Desmond first enters the Animus is not the same man who travels to Tuscany and later Venice as he hunts down his targets. Speaking of the Animus, the scenes outside of Italy back in the near-future have been cut down significantly to a few key scenes throughout the game. The nice thing about this, other than spending most of our time with Ezio doing pretty much whatever we like, is that the near-future scenes never feel terribly superfluous, as we learn more about what the struggle between the Assassins and the Templars is like in the near-future as opposed to how it works in the Renaissance.

The story in Assassin’s Creed II also becomes infused with the kind of material that make the conspiracies of Hideo Kojima’s games seem like a badly written episode of Heroes. From his previous over-exposure to the Animus, Desmond has acquired the ‘eagle vision’ used by his ancestors, and found some messages written in blood back at Abstergo by the room’s previous occupant, ‘Subject 16′. Slightly insane thanks to Abstergo’s experiments, he managed to hack the Animus and place clues throughout the landscape for Desmond to uncover, leading him to the ‘Pieces of Eden’ that the Templars desperately want to acquire. These are ancient artifacts of unspeakable power that have been handed down through the ages, and the Assassins and Templars have each struggled to get their hands on them. No further information on Subject 16 is available, but his voice is so familiar…

Possible identities of Subject 16…

Instead of restricting the player to a specific series of tasks that need to be completed before stabbing somebody, Assassin’s Creed II allows you a lot more freedom. The free-running game-play is just as fun and intuitive as the previous title, though some players might be frustrated by sections that actually require precision platforming to do some puzzle-solving. Also, there’s a side-quest involving Ezio acquiring art and fixing up storefronts around his home villa to increase his income, but other than buying better weapons you never really need as much money as you get. While I appreciate the fact that there’s an in-game explanation for money being a non-issue for Ezio, there comes a point where you’re getting a lot more money than you know what to do with, and the best armor in the game is actually available for free if you can stand the aforementioned platform puzzle bits. You don’t even have to touch the villa if you really don’t want to, and don’t mind coming home to a termite-infested flophouse every time you have Leonardo decipher another few Codex pages, as the side missions all pay you money anyway. Of course some of the locals can smell the aroma of flesh florins on you, and wandering minstrels come out of the woodwork to ply you for some with badly-sung ballads they’ll warble at you until you shut them up, be it with coin-tossing or the back of your hand. I’m probably getting a bit nit-picky at this point, but bear with me, I’ve only got one more nit to pick, and that’s the combat.

I appreciate that the game allows us to see how badass Ezio becomes, and since he’s so impressively killative, the combat never feels terribly challenging once you master the counter and dodge moves. While this might seem a little too easy for some, and I for one never felt like Ezio was truly in mortal danger, the player has the opportunity to sit back and try different things when a fight happens. Bored with the sword? Pull out the dagger for a bit. Do you like that poleaxe a Brute is trying to shove down your throat? Grab it from him and hit him in the face. The options available to Ezio do ease the tedium of the combat a bit, and I’d even go so far as to say that the tedious nature of combat works in the game’s favor. While it isn’t hard for the most part, being tedious means a player might not want to waste time with it, opting instead to hire a few hookers as a distraction, parkour themselves into place for an optimum kill or find other creative ways to clear the path between Ezio and his unfortunate target. As an aside, try poisoning one of the guards and then throwing money at the feet of a nearby crowd. Trust me.

Stuff I Liked: The music, voice acting, story elements and controls remain some of the better points of this growing series of games. Also, the ending of the game first has Ezio do something incredibly ballsy and awesome and follows that with some of the best busting of the fourth wall I’ve seen since I read the Deadpool comic book.
Stuff I Didn’t Like: I would have much rather gotten more use out of Leonardo’s flying machine or more dialog with Paola or Bartolomeo than have as much to do with the villa as we did.
Stuff I Loved: There’s an incredible sense of freedom to be experienced in Assassin’s Creed II that I for one really appreciated. Provided you don’t run around hacking up innocents, you can do pretty much anything you like in the beautiful setting of Renaissance Italy, and that in and of itself is tons of fun. “Everything is permitted” indeed.

Bottom Line: I recommend that you rent the game first if you’re unsure about it. Also, playing the first game isn’t a requirement, but you might have a better understanding of the game and its setting if you do so. Either way, there’s a lot to like about this game, and I consider it worth the money of a purchase.