Seeing as it’s the third film in what has come to be known as the “Cornetto Trilogy,” along with predecessors Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, the latest effort from director Edgar Wright, co-writers Wright and Simon Pegg, and co-stars Pegg and Nick Frost, The World’s End, is a movie that comes with quite a bit of hype and expectation. Both of the first two films have successfully combined humor and drama with the sorts of genre film tropes that nerds love, and both have become cult favorites as a result. The World’s End is the same sort of movie, only instead of combining hijinx and life lessons with zombie movie tropes or buddy cop movie tropes like the previous films did, it exists in the world of science fiction films—a world in which alien overlords are attempting to replace us with robot impostors.
To be more specific, The World’s End is a movie that’s primarily concerned with a pub crawl. Even more specifically, it’s concerned with a pub crawl that a group of five friends were unable to complete on a fateful night in their youth, and that they’re now going to attempt to recreate as they approach their 40s. To be fair, the recreation is the sole plan of the leader of the group, Gary King (Simon Pegg), who is the only one of them who was never quite able to grow up and build an adult life for himself. The other four (Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, and Eddie Marsan) have kind of become uptight squares, so Gary decides to take it upon himself to help them rekindle their lost spirit by finally completing the circuit of 12 bars in their hometown that are known collectively as The Golden Mile. Or perhaps he more accurately just wants to get them back together to try and relive his own glory days now that his life has been exposed as an unequivocal failure. Either way, the specifics don’t much matter, because the whole endeavor gets interrupted by that pesky little realization that the townsfolk have been replaced by robot impostors anyway.
The first thing you think about when you think of an Edgar Wright movie is stylish filmmaking. This is the guy who made Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, after all. Well, as you would expect, there are plenty of fun little filmmaking touches that show up here. The stylish touch becomes apparent very early on, when, after a brief period where we’re introduced to the main characters as children, we then become reintroduced to them as adults, and Wright’s constantly panning camera takes us through their lives all at the same time, as if they were sharing walls with one another. The shot is fun to watch, gives us a good amount of information all at once, and sets the tone for all of the slick filmmaking to come. The production design here is great too. There are so many little details that went into the creation of these 12 pubs and their inhabitants, and they’re the types of details that will reward multiple re-watches for fans.
The writing is the real star of the show here though. Wright and Pegg have been working together as co-writers for a while now, and the place where their chemistry best shows up is in the cleverness of their dialogue. The World’s End is clever—so clever. It’s basically bursting with cleverness, and that cleverness allows it to be consistently funny all the way from beginning to end. It’s paced really well too, at least for a while. The first act of the film is basically the Simon Pegg show, where he chews scenery while everyone acts inert and annoyed around him, and the tension of that situation builds and builds until you don’t think you’re going to be able to take it anymore—and that’s when all of the robot craziness happens.
Which brings us to the next thing about the film that’s just great fun—all of the drunken brawls that end up happening. This film has quite a lot of fight scenes, and though they’re mostly staged by comedic types who you wouldn’t normally think of as action stars, they get so wildly out of control and destructive that you would think they were taking place in a different sort of movie than this entirely. Therein lies the thing that’s been most helpful in making this pseudo trilogy of films a success—they work as great comedies at the same time that they work as great zombie movies, or action movies, or sci-fi films. Well, The World’s End works as a great sci-fi film for a while. But a little more about that after we talk about the acting.
Pegg uses the film as a thesis statement on how much he has to offer as an actor. The pathetic, haunted, abrasively outgoing character he plays here is totally unlike any other character we’ve seen him play before, and he makes it all feel completely organic. At this point we’ve seen him play the straight man, the boiling kettle of rage, the wacky comic relief, and now the over the top personality, and so far he’s been able to slip into each role with zero visible effort. Who knows how deep the waters of his talent run. That being said, Frost does get a couple of big moments that trump anything anybody else does in this film. He’s a comedic powerhouse, and seeing as this particular movie keeps him in the reserves and only brings him to the forefront when it’s going to count, his stuff hits like a neutron bomb. Also, Eddie Marsan should get some mention for being absolutely adorable as the put-upon Peter. If you could clone him and sell him in pet shops you’d never have to work again.
With all that out of the way, let’s address the film’s problems, and how they eventually build until they nearly take over during the third act. That excellent pacing that we mentioned earlier? Eventually it gets derailed. Those out of control fights? Eventually there gets to be so many of them that they become meaningless. The problem here is a problem of tone. The robots are so easily and so hilariously defeated that any tension inherent in their attacks quickly evaporates. Consequently, there are only so many fights can you sit through before it all just becomes a bunch of noise. And even when certain members of the principal cast begin to suffer consequences for their invasion of the robot-overrun town, the tone of the film is still too broadly comedic for you to really care. Pegg’s character acts as the eyes that we see the story through, and he doesn’t seem concerned about the fate of his friends at all—he’s solely interested in finishing the goal of drinking a pint in each of the 12 pubs, which eventually starts to feel pointless and ridiculous in light of the apparent alien invasion.
Perhaps if some sort of MacGuffin could have been created where Pegg and company’s continued consumption of alcohol was the only thing that could save the human race, then the pub crawl plot could have peacefully co-existed alongside the sci-fi elements, but here they always feel like they’re in direct contradiction to one another, which leads to the script constantly having to explain away why we’re carrying on to the next bar. The deeper thematics and the character-driven subplots of the film get in the way too. Instead of happening organically, we’re always just told what we’re supposed to be getting out of a scene, or what a character is feeling due to a particular development, and none of it ever works quite as well as it should.
And then, when we finally get to the end point that the film has been building toward, everything completely stops and we get a climax where the characters just stand around and monologue for long stretches. Due to the cleverness of the dialogue these scenes are funny enough, but they just don’t work as the end of a story that put people’s lives in danger. And the story putting people’s lives in danger never really works in the first place, because the grave stakes are never treated with any weight, so the whole thing just comes off as a bit of a lark. In the end, what we get is something of a video game plot, much like Wright’s Scott Pilgrim, where the protagonist keeps progressing from level to level, but there’s never any organic storytelling reasons for what we’re watching other than the fact that the script has set up a series of obstacles for him to robotically go through, so we need to watch him go through them.
