The World's End - Movie Review

The World's End is a 2013 British science fiction comedy film directed by Edgar Wright, written by him and the critical acclaimed actor Simon Pegg, seen in epic blockbuster like Star Trek: Into Darkness and Mission Impossible IV. It is the third movie in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, following Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. The film is about a group of old friends who try to reach the last pub in their unfinished pub crawl while discovering that their hometown turned into a an alien invasion gateway. Sounds ridiculous, right? That’s the fun part about the movie. It may doesn’t reach the amount of jokes like Hangover 3 did, but the jokes are better constructed that takes a moment to fully understand them, because many of them have an underlying meaning.

Simon Pegg plays the character Gary King, who was the greatest Kid in school, followed by four great friends till the end of the world. What seems important and funny while being a pupil is mostly embarrassing and unimportant the moment people became adults. Their goals change to more meaningful stuff like a career and family, but not for Gary King. He stayed the same even though he is now around 40 years old, which is on one hand quite sad and on the other even sadder. Seeing an old grown man act like a teenager shows us all how embarrassing and dumb we were, even more that he should be wiser after this many years. This mind problem of his and the delusion of being cool even now leads to many conflicts with his grown up friends who try to be normal and helping him out for the sake of old memories. The story follows the group of friends through 12 pubs ending in the bar “The World’s End”. In each of them the group discovers more stuff about the alien invasion and reminds them of their past. There are parts that feels stretched, especially the ending, but the overall pace is great. The same goes for the music which fits the scenes good enough to multiply the feelings of the movie without overshadowing it with grandiloquence.

The cast of the movie is set together by many well known actors like Nick Frost and the most popular British actor right now after Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman. He is not only known as the character Watson in Sherlock and Bilbo Beutlin in The Hobbit, but also for several other movies and theater plays. We also got Ex-Bond Pierce Brosnan and David Bradley, known for his role as the Janitor in the Harry Potter Series. The other actors are mostly unknown at least for non-British watchers, but all of them plays their role perfectly. None of them feels out of place or meaningless. It's like the comedy version of the Expendables. So the humorous part does a great job and is surprisingly the worse part of the movie. Edgar Wright created a comedy movie that has such a great fighting choreography and picture composition that it feels more like a high spec action blockbuster like “Man of Steel”. Most of the fights are done in one shot without a shaky cam and still feel dynamic. There are so many unique ideas put in there to make the numerous fights exciting. Also the special effects are great accomplished for a low budget movie that they don’t feel cheap or lacking.

In conclusion: The Worlds End may not be the best movies and has tiresome parts but it is one of the best comedy and directed movies in recent years. It's bad that the movie didn’t get the attention it deserved, but maybe the blue-ray sells will give it another chance to open up for a bigger audience.