Movie Review: The World's End (2013)

I have never felt the desire to go on a pub crawl.

Walk into a pub and crawl out later? Sure. Done that.

Do a bit of impromptu bar-hopping? Yeah. Done that, too.

But venture forth with the intent of hitting bar after bar after bar until my liver bursts forth from my body and runs away screaming into the night? No. Just does not sound like fun.

Gary King (Simon Pegg) obviously feels differently. He considers the night he and his best mates from childhood spent making the attempt at the "Golden Mile"--the 12-pub run in their sleepy home town of Newton Haven, concluding with The World's End, to have been the best night of his life, even though he only made it through nine of the 12 pubs.

Now, 20 years later, Gary wants to make a go at the "Golden Mile" again, whether his mates--all of whom have grown up, gotten jobs, started families and/or gotten on with their lives--want to or not.

Through cajoling, coercion and sheer force of somewhat bleary will, Gary gets all four friends (Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan and Nick Frost) to drive back to Newton Haven to spend the better part of an afternoon and evening working their way up the "Golden Mile." Along the way, there is much drinking (except for Frost as Andy, formerly an epic party animal--and Gary's best friend--and now "on the wagon" and only drinking tap water), much bitching (especially about Gary, who's still wearing the same coat and driving the same car he did 20 years ago) and more than a bit of confusion as to why so few people in their hometown seem to recognize them except for Sam (Rosamund Pike), the sister of one of the friends, the longtime love-from-afar of another and a one-time-only fling for Gary.

Up to this point, The World's End is more or less a typical "old friends revisit old battlegrounds and open old wounds" comedy with most of the cast underplaying while Pegg's Gary reaches for Captain Jack Sparrow-level scene-chewing glory. Then, something happens--well into the crawl, Gary gets into a fight with a teenage in a bathroom and discovers, much to his horror, that things (and people) have changed a lot in Newton Haven since he last passed this way--a LOT.

After that, The World's End becomes a different movie--it doesn't abandon the buddy-movie layer, but adds a whole other retro-'70s sci-fi layer that doesn't clash with the previous material, but complements it in surprisingly sweet and satisfying ways.

Or maybe not so surprisingly, since this is how director/cowriter Edgar Wright and partners Pegg and Frost usually work: start off in one, seemingly gentile and benign genre, then shift into something that wouldn't be out of place in a 1975 drive-in. Shaun of the Dead (one of the best films of any kind in the last decade) starts out as a slacker comedy and ends with a zombie apocalypse. Hot Fuzz is an amusing fish-out-of-water buddy-cop flick until a serial killer bounces into the mix. Here, everything's normal until it's not--which, as it turns out, is exactly normal for Wright, Pegg and Frost. An evening out with old friends reliving past "glories" becomes a fight for survival not just for them, but for the whole damn world.

It doesn't hurt to have solid support from the likes of David Bradley (as a crazy old coot who's not so crazy after all), Pierce Brosnan (as an old teacher of the boys who doesn't seem to have gotten any older) and Pike (who gets to enact a brief Die Another Day reunion with that film's James Bond, Brosnan). But, as usual, it comes down to the onscreen chemistry and timing between Pegg and Frost, and that is as strong as ever, even with them playing something of a role reversal, with Pegg loud and obnoxious and Frost levelheaded and calm. And as tempting as it is to accuse Pegg of overacting (remember the mention of Jack Sparrow earlier?), it's just as easy to credit him for a surprisingly nuanced performance: it's not Pegg who's overacting, but Gary, strapping on an antic disposition so his friends, all of whom seem to have their shit together (appearances have a way of being deceiving), won't catch on to how really and truly fucked up he is.

Except when they need him to not be so fucked up. After all, when the world's end may well be nigh (what, you thought the title was just ironic?), your oldest, best friends may be all you have, no matter how fucked up they really are.