The World's End (15.)
Directed by Edgar Wright.
Starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan and Rosalind Pike. 109 mins
Most popular cinema is a form of wish fulfilment, generally escapism. Surely though everybody has at some stage wished for something more lifelike. Not realism – our Mr Leighs and Clarks and Loaches have more than covered that - but that just occasionally instead of granite jawed, noble heroism there might be some slovenly, deadpan uncertainty; that we could watch people like us, in places like ours - but interesting.
The exploiting of this simple insight has been the ticket to improbable success for Wright, Pegg and Frost. After creating the third greatest use of a half hour comedy slot on a Channel 4 Friday night, the creative triumvirate moved on to the big screen and did something miraculous – made British films you weren’t embarrassed to let foreigners see. Some nine years on from Shaun of the Dead we reach, rather sadly, the final part of their Cornetto trilogy and what better way to go out than with a big, celebratory booze up.
The World’s End is a film about a memorable pub crawl so it is wholly appropriate that it starts slowly but gets funnier and funnier as they get drunker and drunker. (As opposed to a film about a typical pub crawl which would start full of optimism and hope and then gradually degenerate into confusion and ill conceived, badly executed action sequences – like almost every other summer movie.)
Initially it eschews the genre parodies of Shaun and Hot Fuzz. Twenty years on, five old school friends meet up in their home town to recreate an epic pub crawl they undertook the day they left school. The opening scenes of the gang as youths have an awkward sun-kissed Cemetery Junction feel to them and once the group has been reassembled it takes a good half hour to break the ice.
Pegg plays a fairly desperate figure, a wild man who has never found anything in adult life to equal his teenage dreams, while the other four are all respectable, settled, middle class professionals. Fortunately this isn’t another tragi-comic tale of middle aged yearnings, and when a sci-fi threat makes itself known after the fourth or fifth round the evening really takes off.
This is a film which knows when to twist and when to stick, when it needs to tweak audience expectations and when to give them what they want. Superhero movies await Wright in Hollywood and here he delivers a pub fight scene that is edited so crisply it generates more excitement than anything we’ve seen this summer since Star Trek Into Darkness. Pegg is fundamentally miscast but it isn’t allowed to hold the film back.
I howled with laughter quite often though the next day couldn’t really remember most of what was so damn funny. But I do recall being charmed by the moments when Eddie Marsan’s character can be seen cheerfully snickering away to himself. Even though he’s in mortal danger he’s having the night of his life.
Directed by Edgar Wright.
Starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan and Rosalind Pike. 109 mins
Most popular cinema is a form of wish fulfilment, generally escapism. Surely though everybody has at some stage wished for something more lifelike. Not realism – our Mr Leighs and Clarks and Loaches have more than covered that - but that just occasionally instead of granite jawed, noble heroism there might be some slovenly, deadpan uncertainty; that we could watch people like us, in places like ours - but interesting.
The exploiting of this simple insight has been the ticket to improbable success for Wright, Pegg and Frost. After creating the third greatest use of a half hour comedy slot on a Channel 4 Friday night, the creative triumvirate moved on to the big screen and did something miraculous – made British films you weren’t embarrassed to let foreigners see. Some nine years on from Shaun of the Dead we reach, rather sadly, the final part of their Cornetto trilogy and what better way to go out than with a big, celebratory booze up.
The World’s End is a film about a memorable pub crawl so it is wholly appropriate that it starts slowly but gets funnier and funnier as they get drunker and drunker. (As opposed to a film about a typical pub crawl which would start full of optimism and hope and then gradually degenerate into confusion and ill conceived, badly executed action sequences – like almost every other summer movie.)
Initially it eschews the genre parodies of Shaun and Hot Fuzz. Twenty years on, five old school friends meet up in their home town to recreate an epic pub crawl they undertook the day they left school. The opening scenes of the gang as youths have an awkward sun-kissed Cemetery Junction feel to them and once the group has been reassembled it takes a good half hour to break the ice.
Pegg plays a fairly desperate figure, a wild man who has never found anything in adult life to equal his teenage dreams, while the other four are all respectable, settled, middle class professionals. Fortunately this isn’t another tragi-comic tale of middle aged yearnings, and when a sci-fi threat makes itself known after the fourth or fifth round the evening really takes off.
This is a film which knows when to twist and when to stick, when it needs to tweak audience expectations and when to give them what they want. Superhero movies await Wright in Hollywood and here he delivers a pub fight scene that is edited so crisply it generates more excitement than anything we’ve seen this summer since Star Trek Into Darkness. Pegg is fundamentally miscast but it isn’t allowed to hold the film back.
I howled with laughter quite often though the next day couldn’t really remember most of what was so damn funny. But I do recall being charmed by the moments when Eddie Marsan’s character can be seen cheerfully snickering away to himself. Even though he’s in mortal danger he’s having the night of his life.
