|
The World's End
| Released |
19 July 2013 |
| Director |
Edgar Wright |
Starring
|
Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan, Rosamund Pike, |
| Writer(s) |
Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright |
Producer(s)
|
Nira Park, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner |
| Origin |
United Kingdom |
| Running Time |
109 minutes |
| Genre |
Action, comedy, sci-fi |
| Rating |
15A |
|
|
Crawling full circle.
It all starts like another laddish comedy caper. Five estranged friends return to their hometown to re-attempt an epic pub crawl they failed to complete twenty years before. Amounts of alcohol to rival Withnail & I are consumed. Old grudges are brought up. Childhood memories are revisited.
And then – about thirty or so minutes into the film – what was just another nostalgia-fuelled night out morphs into a battle for the survival of the entire human race.
The World’s End marks the return of director Edgar Wright and his two favourite actors, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, for the culmination of their Cornetto Trilogy. Following in the vein of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, this is once more a deconstruction of an iconic genre. And for the conclusion it could only be the genre that is if anything even closer to the filmmakers’ hearts than either horror or action: sci-fi. In particular we are talking about a very British iteration of sci-fi, somewhere between Village of the Damned and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (the books, not the film adaptation).
The film is packed with references and in-jokes, and Wright sticks to his repertoire of fast cuts and busy dialogue, with heavy use of foreshadowing, tongue-in-cheek symbolism. Scarcely a single scene passes where several different threads aren’t being unravelled at once, with slapstick comedy overlapping serious character development, all underpinned by clever nods to a dozen different genres and a thousand other movies (mostly of the “B” variety). The result is a corset-tight narrative: barely a second of film is wasted, and almost every line of dialogue and background detail serves a purpose – even the names of the pubs along the pub crawl allude to the events which take place within.
Of course this is nothing we haven’t seen in Shaun and Fuzz, not to mention Scott Pilgrim vs the World. The World’s End would be repetitive and dull if not for its characters, who manage to side-step the clichéd expectations and become far more interesting and memorable than could have been expected. Frost and Pegg have more or less swapped typical roles, with Frost as the uptight straight man against Pegg’s flamboyant messer. Meanwhile the added supported cast (Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan, Paddy Considine) keep the buddy act from becoming stale, and have more than enough screentime to chew some serious scenery.
Wright clearly understands the rigid structural rules that govern filmmaking, but rather than adhering to them he turns them all on their heads. Rather than acquiescing to an audience with slow attention span, The World’s End practically insists that its audience jumps to certain conclusions faster than the protagonists. In Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz the joke was that the characters knew the tropes as well as the audience did – now we come full circle, with characters who may know the tropes too, but are too drunk to recall them and plough blindly into what we the audience have already realised is impending doom.
This is just as fun to watch as it sounds. The World’s End manages to thread a line between clever and dumb humour and surprisingly well realised character drama, all without ever requiring its audience to check their brains at the door. It is a fitting end to an impressive trilogy, which with any luck will take a leaf out of Douglas Adams’ book and squeeze in a few more entries, making in into a trilogy of four (or even five).
- Bernard O’Rourke |
