It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. No, not 18th century France, but the experience of being 18 years old — that emotionally magnified fulcrum in life from whence everyone, supposedly, takes off. That glorious adolescent purgatory is one of Western storytelling’s most beloved tools, so it’s only fitting that cult film heroes Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have decided to wrap up their so-called Three Flavors Cornetto trilogy with a final installment that, on its surface, is about a handful of grown men getting hammered in the midst of a condescending alien takeover, but at its core, it's about the exact opposite.
The World's End is the culmination of the Wright and Pegg trilogy, which also includes Shaun of the Dead (2004), and Hot Fuzz (2007), two cult-favorite stories about modern life delivered via the Trojan horse of a genre film – a zombie flick for Shaun, a buddy-cop picture for Fuzz. The World's End is no different, except that this one is hidden in the guise of an apocalypse flick. The third installment of their nerd-powered opus revolves around a return to the modest, suburban upbringings of its characters, another reliable trope at the multiplex – except in this flick Wright and Pegg decided to set it on fire.
We saw this coming. The genius of the Cornetto film lies in their knowledge of and subsequent ability to improvise within known genres and structures. If you've seen the World's End trailer, you know what it's about: Four childhood bros, now boring and pushing 40, somehow get convinced by their former ringleader to recreate a bonkers pub crawl they first attempted when they were 18. And true to form, The World's End is no different from its predecessors when it comes to its aging man-child themes (grow up, don't be a dick, get drunk with your friends), recurring jokes (the fences, the circular banter, the infamous Cornetto cones), and impeccable timing for which the Cornetto Crew are revered.
Amidst bizarre, horn-driven intro music peppered with WWII-era sound-bytes about liberation and "getting loaded," we meet Gary King (Pegg), a drug-addled, would-be Peter Pan, who realizes mid-support group that his life never got better than the night his gang finished high school and attempted that vaunted 12-pub crawl, the Golden Mile. Flinging himself off the wagon, he uses an assortment of half-truths, complete lies, and money-shuffling to get his four best friends – Peter (Eddie Marsan), Steven (Paddy Considine), Oliver (Freeman) and Andy (Frost), none of whom have heard from Gary in about 20 years – on-board to try the Golden Mile all over it again.
Call it regression – for some people, high school never really ends – but he convinces all of them to join in, and they return to the sleepy, fictional 'burb of Newton Haven only to find that the quirky pubs they once knew have been "Starbucksed" since they've been gone: the bartenders have forgotten them, the menus are all identical, and each pub only has one type of beer on draft. Oliver's sister Sam (Rosamund Pike), who hooked up with 18-year-old Gary King on the first time around, joins them in the homecoming, only to swiftly extinguish King's rematch hopes. All five are confronted with the brutal, well-trodden truth: just because you’ve left your hometown doesn’t mean you deserve the welcome of a conquering hero when you come back.
Just as King's sadness and his friends' frustration is about to hit peak realness, however, things take a sudden turn for the sci-fi when a drunken King tries to make friends with the wrong teenager in the loo. During the subsequent confrontation, he ends up slamming the teen's body into a sink fixture, knocking his skull clean off his body like a Lego head because – dun dun dun – he is a robot. And that's when the real Cornetto magic kicks in.
From there, Wright and crew take their signature detour into genre-film archetype: the five have been discovered, and will now be hunted by invaders who believe, like certain other cybernetic species, that resistance is futile. It's a highly predictable arc, but it's the flourishes you're really paying to see: the deliciously childlike conceptualization of the supposedly beneficent alien machines (seriously, don't call them robots); the pitch-perfect appearances from Pierce Brosnan and David Bradley; their modernization of Monty Python-style banter. Wright and Pegg operate within well-trodden territory, one they have studied with fanboy obsession for as long as Gary King has obsessed over the pub crawl of June 22, 1990.
What's more novel is that were American writer/producer/directors like Judd Apatow and Adam McKay (all due respect) write their main characters as somewhat attractive and funny dudes who still claim they're losers, Wright and Pegg's lads truly are. Gary King, of course, is the prime example. His mania and addictive behavior bleed through his comedic alpha posturing to the point where you almost feel bad for enjoying it. (Pegg's pristine performance as the wildly addicted, incorrigibly bombastic King is only enhanced by the fact that the actor really did quit pub life between Fuzz and World's End.) And while the others have made comfortable lives for themselves – Peter as a car salesman, Oliver a real estate agent, Steven a divorced construction entrepreneur, Andy a recovering alcoholic/current workaholic corporate lawyer – none of them have won life's lottery, either.
And it's their overt insecurities despite decades of so-called maturity that stick in you so deeply. With the superb character studies Pegg and Wright have written for the five friends, it's both a wonder and a shame that the sixth character, Oliver's sister Sam (acted as empathetically as possible by the superbly relatable Pike), isn't written with the same humanity. Her personality rests on having hooked up with the wrong people in high school (and being smarter now, clearly) and having a cute catchphrase ("oh, crumbs"). It's not even clear what she does for a living now, even though that could have been established in one line. She exists purely as she relates to the five friends, despite being far more instrumental to their survival than, say, their former drug dealer "Reverend Green" (Michael Smiley); if you took those connections away, Sam would simply be, as Gary King drools upon seeing her for the first time in two decades, "fit."
Regardless, thanks to the downfall of civilization, at some point in The World's End most every character gets a chance to start from scratch either by moving forwards into adulthood, or regressing backward to the past. Seeing how that plays out is part of the fun, so no spoilers, but if there’s a better way to cap off a trilogy about finding a happy medium between perpetual adolescence and finally growing up ... well, we'd prefer not to know.
Update 8/23/2013 5 PM EST: A previous version of this articles referred to a cameo from Alexander Skarsgård; the actor in that scene is actually James Granstrom.
