(Focus Features)Director Edgar Wright makes genre movies with a heart. His breakthrough feature, 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, was an effective and hilarious zombie movie. It wasn’t just funny and gory but human, its concept of the walking dead reinforcing what it means to be alive and human and have relationships. Hot Fuzz was a parody of Michael Bay buddy movies, but its generous dollop of Wicker Man isolationism leads it to question the nature of authority, and to champion traditionalism. While it seemed a demotion for officer Nick Angel (Simon Pegg) to move from the London police force to a small village, the soundtrack held a key: not one but two tracks from The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, Ray Davies’ heartfelt and hummable defense of old-fashioned English eccentricity.
But time marches on: Ray Davies has written crap for the last forty years, Michael Bay keeps making terrible movies, and the creative team of Wright, co-writer and actor Simon Pegg and actor Nick Frost are all pushing or past forty. The idea of the Cornetto Trilogy came about when someone pointed out the recurrence of the Cornetto brand of ice cream cone in Shaun and Fuzz. Wright joked that he would make a Three Flavors trilogy, a gory middlebrow counterpart to arthouse director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy.
The claim was made in jest. But like Wright’s humor, there’s a method to the madness of completing a trilogy named for an object that occurs in these films only in passing. Like Charles Foster’s Kane’s deathbed memory of a sled recalls lost innocence, ice cream is a perfect symbol for a series of quasi-action films that addresses rampant consumerism, and concludes with life’s greatest adventure: growing up.
The World’s End begins with Gary King (Simon Pegg) telling a story from his youth: a pub crawl with four friends along the so-called Golden Mile in sleepy Newton Haven. They never finished the circuit of twelve pubs, but the attempt was in Gary’s memory one of the best days of his life. Twenty years later, we see to whom he’s telling his story: a circle of patients in rehab.
Wright doesn’t let you forget Gary’s a fuckup, but he doesn’t dwell on it either, and neither, for the most part, does Gary. He makes the rounds of his fellow pub-crawlers, who unlike Gary are now responsible members of society with jobs and families. Somehow, he talks them into meeting up to try to recreate the past.
What starts as a coming of middle-age movie becomes an apocalyptic plot of alien invasion, and appropriately, the first specimens of this inhuman life form are revealed in the form of teenagers because, get off my lawn! I’ll leave the ensuing details for viewers to discover, but a word on the excellent ensemble cast. Seeing Pegg and Frost is like seeing old friends in new roles, and Eddie Marsan is a welcome and heartbreaking addition to this human crew.
Gary and his friends can’t relive the past — nobody can. The World’s End deals with themes of free will, propaganda, conformity, friendship, aging and responsibility, in a funny and well-crafted package. If it causes you to ponder the meaning of the passing years, or if it just makes you want to go out for a beer, it will have done its job well.
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The World’s End
Directed by Edgar Wright
Written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg
With Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Rosamund Pike, Eddie Marsan
Rated R for pervasive language including sexual references.
