Review

Twenty years after failing to complete the "golden mile" pub crawl in the rural hamlet of Newton Haven alcoholic Gary King decides he and his friends should give it another lash. Only problem being that while Gary is a layabout his four mates have gone on to families, careers, and respectability. Gary uses a bit of deceit, outright lying, and manipulation to get the band back together and headed to Newton Haven to do a bit of unfinished business.

Confronting our four musketeers is an epic pub crawl featuring a pint in each of twelve pubs starting with The First Post and completing at The World's End. Unfortunately there are a few things standing in the way of success, people from their past, Gary being banned from one pub, oh and an alien invasion of the "body snatchers" variety. Can Wright, Pegg, and Frost recreate the magic of their previous "Cornetto" movies or does this one suffer from brewers droop?

There are three requirements of a "Cornetto" trilogy movie for mine, firstly Nick Frost has to drop a C nuke, secondly Simon Pegg gets to jump a fence, and finally someone has to be eating a cornetto in at least one scene. The two prior movies in the trilogy, Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), certainly had all three elements. For our North American readers a cornetto is a frozen ice cream cone that comes in various flavours, as referenced in the trilogy strawberry, original, and mint respectively. My thanks to Wikipedia for that factoid which had escaped my attention.

While keeping to the requirements Edgar Wright is mixing it up a bit. We certainly get a few C nukes being delivered but surprisingly via Simon Pegg's Gary King character rather than the expected Nick Frost delivery as Andrew Knightley. In the two previous movies Frost's characters have always been the work shy sidekicks while Pegg's characters have been the go getter action types, the reverse is true in The World's End with Andrew Knightley doing the business. Simon Pegg still gets to jump over a few things, generally in a slap stick way, and you'll have to wait till near the end of the movie in the epilogue for the cornetto reference. So yes things have change in the final movie of the trilogy but we still get kick arse action, a lot of sight gags and one liners, and yes another genre being laughed at.

A vastly superior movie to the normal Boredwood conveyor belt flicks that repeat the same tired jokes over and over again

I should mention that The World's End is aimed squarely at the alien invasion of the Body Snatchers variety genre, which unfortunately isn't my forte so I am probably missing a whole bunch of reference and subtle gags. For those with short memories Shaun was a parody of horror flicks, too many horror references to name, while Fuzz was more ambitious and took on not only the police buddy movie but also the Sergio Leone spaghetti western. To a certain degree therefore World's End is slightly less far reaching than the previous two movies.

The humour in the movie should keep most punters happy with this aspect of the show. I was chuckling along for most of the run time and at times bursting into outright laughter. Thankfully the rest of the audience was also dialling in else I could have been more irritating than usual. Equally on the win side of the equation the cinema session I attended was sans teens with mobiles, hence it was a good experience and not another example of why for the most part you are better off waiting on the DVD. Guess that either demonstrates the audience for World's End is skewing older or the normal self centered retards were under house arrest or something. I did mention the humour works in the movie right?

There's plenty of action going down, something that has never been a problem in the trilogy. It's worth the price of admission to catch Nick Frost going ballistic with a couple of bar stools alone. So yeah the movie does hit the high octane juice in various scenes while not taking away from the humour, developing characters, and the overall plot direction.

About the only real problem the movie had was a slight drifting of pace during the middle block. World's End needed another trip to the editing studio to tighten the bolts as things definitely drop in pace during some exposition scenes that overall were not required, we get the full skinny toward the climax.

Behind the camera Edgar Wright is slightly more subdued than he has been in previous outings but still retains his innate ability to get the kinetic action scenes happening in a watchable fashion and knows when to go with close ups and when to pull back. At no stage could I fault Wright's ability to get the best framing of scenes happening and to capture the full narrative. There's none of that irritating things happening just out of focus or even worse off screen.

Simon Pegg is once again on and shows his versatility in World's End adopting an entirely different persona to that seen previously in the trilogy. His chemistry with Nick Frost is of course evident with both actors making me a believer. The support cast is equally top notch, look out for a cameo from former Bond Pierce Brosnan, with Rosamund Pike adding a female touch to the otherwise make orientated antics of a pub crawl.

I have been anticipating The World's End since the announcement of the final movie in the Cornetto trilogy and was reasonably happy when I finally caught the movie. Okay World's End would be third in ranking in the trilogy for mine but the movie is still vastly superior to the cookie cutters being pumped out of Boredwood in a never ending line of gruel. Recommended to fans of the Edgar Wright team, SciFi Invasion flicks, and laugh out loud cinema. Of course if you don't fit that category then you can pretty much wait for the DVD release without disappointing your parents.