The World's End (2013)

One of the great treasures of Edgar Wright’s so-called “Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy” is that he and co-writer Simon Pegg have always placed making a good movie at the top of their list of priorities. All three films are essentially genre spoofs, with Shaun of the Dead tackling horror, Hot Fuzz exploring the world of action and cop films, and now with The World’s End, Wright and company have used elements of apocalyptic science fiction to tell a surprisingly moving story about nostalgia and the challenges of facing adulthood. It’s also ridiculously entertaining, and the second half of this film is a tour de force of nonstop escalation that shows all that can be accomplished when filmmakers actually choose to take chances. For most filmmakers, there always seems to be a line of absurdity that they refuse to cross. Wright does not see this line, and if he does he is always willing to crash right through it. It’s absolutely exhilarating to watch a movie and have no earthly idea what’s going to happen from moment to moment, and it’s all the more exhilarating when all that chaos winds up taking you somewhere worthwhile.

Pegg, the star of all three "Cornetto" films, plays Gary King. In his youth he was the coolest guy in town, but now all these years later he is the only one in his group of friends who has refused to grow up and live in the now. Feeling a sudden wave of nostalgia, Gary goes around town and gathers his up his old group of friends for one last crack at The Golden Mile, a pub-crawl through 12 different establishments in their hometown of Newton Haven. This gang of grown misfits includes Andy (Nick Frost), Oliver (Martin Freeman), Steven (Paddy Considine) and Peter (Eddie Marsan), and while none of them are completely into the idea of the crawl they are intrigued enough to give it a go. They drive into Newton Haven looking to recapture the glory of their youth, but they quickly suspect that something has changed. Maybe it’s them, or perhaps it is the town. Either way, things get nuts pretty quickly and the film never looks back. Since The World’s End is ultimately about the perils of looking back, perhaps this is the point.

Much of the advertising for the film gives away the broad strokes of what occurs once the madness kicks in, but I will leave that out of the discussion here just in case there be spoilerphobes among ye. Just know that, as I’ve mentioned, the film riffs a great deal on science fiction and apocalypse film conventions while also existing as its own, wholly original thing. That’s the miracle of these movies that Wright has made; they rely so much on other movies but they also feel completely unlike anything else out there. Hot Fuzz is almost entirely made up of action movie clichés, and on the DVD commentary track Pegg and Wright even say they bought a book of clichés by Roger Ebert and tried to fit as many of them into the script as possible. Yet they were able to do that while also telling a thrilling and unpredictable story with an involving relationship at the film’s center. The same can be said of The World’s End. In many ways, this may be the best group of characters that Wright and Pegg have created.

This is not faint praise, considering how important character has been to these two right from the beginning. Wright is a passionate director who fills every frame of his films with life, and yet he’s able to balance this gloriously cinematic energy with a desire to move each character’s journey forward. His films fly in the face of the common belief that action comedies can never really be funny and exciting at the same time. With The World’s End, he’s now made three terrific pieces of evidence that would suggest otherwise. It’s not that comedy and action can’t be woven together. It’s that most of the directors who attempt to make these types of movies aren’t any good at it. Wright just understands every aspect of the process, and there are very few like him making movies today. Certainly not these types of movies.

These “Cornetto” films also have a habit of attracting some of the best British acting talent out there, and The World’s End is no exception. Pegg and Frost are obviously at the forefront of it all, and this film may feature career-best performances in each case. Their characters in Shaun and Hot Fuzz were different in many ways, but there was a definite first banana/second banana dynamic between the two. In The World’s End, Frost is usually the more confident and mature of the two, though that slightly changes depending on how much alcohol he consumes. Either way, this is a much different and darker journey that Wright has sent his two leading men on, and the result is perhaps the most ambitious of his three collaborations. As always, there’s a sense of gleeful abandon to this film, but also an unusual sense of despondence. This story is ultimately all about attempting to relive the magic of the past, and the characters of this world are unsuccessful far more often than not. Of course, The World’s End is a great film that’s essentially the result of Wright getting the metaphorical band back together, so perhaps that contradicts the message just a bit.

Grade: A