The World’s End
Back in 2004, I wonder whether Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost felt lucky to just get a movie they wanted to do MADE, let alone be embraced by as broad an audience as they found with “Shaun of the Dead.” But that homage to Romero’s zombie saga introduced not just director Wright but his stars as a comedic force to be reckoned with in modern cinema, and that sense of a new British invasion in cinematic comedy continued with their 2007 embrace of action cliches, “Hot Fuzz.” They took a bit of a break from one another with Wright’s “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” and Pegg and Frost starring in the geek comedy, “Paul,” but now, Wright, Pegg, and Frost bring the band back together with “The World’s End,” which they call the end of their “Cornetto Trilogy.” The question would be, “Would they stick the landing?”
Yes and no. “The World’s End,” written, as the other films were, by Wright and Pegg, is by far the loosest of the three films in terms of structure, and the mixing of the character work and genre. “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” were much more confident in how they dealt with the character’s stories within the much larger narrative, while in “The World’s End,” the story of Gary King (Pegg), and how he puts his band of friends back together for one night of glory, is the dominant force driving the film, while the genre trappings, which don’t reveal themselves until about the midway point of the film, almost feel like an afterthought to Wright and Pegg, and seemed to be included just for the sake of tying it within the rest of the trilogy. No matter– “The World’s End” gives us the big, bawdy British laughs we have come to expect from the trio.
That being said, there’s a real tinge of melancholy and pain that shoots through the movie that plays it very real, and very emotional, with the central story. As I mentioned, the primary focus of the film is Gary King, Pegg’s character, and let me tell you, you’ve never seen Pegg in this type of character before. King has some real issues he’s been repressing over the years, and while they were probably around since early childhood, they first came out most glaringly on a June evening in 1990, when he and his four friends– Peter, Andy, Oliver, and Steven –tried “the Golden Mile” in their hometown: one night, 12 bars, one pint each, culminating at The World’s End. They stopped short of finishing the Mile that night, and it’s been eating at King ever since. It doesn’t help that King never really changed after that night, always thinking about himself, and not really following through with his side of his friendships. That was especially true with Andy (Frost’s character), whom hasn’t forgiven Gary for something that happened long after that fateful night on the Mile. We don’t find out what that something is until later in the movie, but we get the idea that it was something big, that even the best friend couldn’t forgive, not only from Andy (and Frost’s terrific performance), but also from the shocked responses by the rest of the crew when Gary bullshits them about getting Andy on board before he’s actually done so. All that past is prologue, however, for the decision Gary makes, as he looks 40 in the mirror, that he needs to finish the Mile, and he needs his boys to help him. When they get back into town, however, they find that a lot has changed, and they’ll need a lot of liquid courage, as well as actual courage, to get through the night.
As I said earlier, the genre stuff doesn’t really gel as well as it did in “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz,” but I suspect the reason for that is because Wright and Pegg were more interested in Gary King’s story, and the way he seems to run off of pure adrenaline when it’s obvious the rest of the crew (Frost’s Andy, Eddie Marsan’s Peter, Paddy Considine’s Steven, and Martin Freeman’s Oliver) really doesn’t want any part of this. But it’s the buried pain, exasperated by his relentless narcissism, that really gets to the heart of Gary, and Pegg is kind of a revelation in the role in how he throws himself into the least sympathetic role of his career. If anyone has ever thought about casting Pegg as a villain, but felt like he was too charming and silly to pull it off, I have a feeling they’d change their mind after watching “The World’s End,” because Pegg made me believe, in every frame of his performance here, that he could create a truly despicable bad guy. Still, you can’t turn off that Simon Pegg charm completely, and especially when he and Frost start to get on the same page as the night unfolds, we see that wonderful, dynamic duo from “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” come to life again as only Wright can wring out of them. The film may not have hit the same creative high notes their earlier efforts did upon first viewing, but I have no doubt “The World’s End” will find itself a home in my moviewatching rotation in year’s to come.
