The World's End: Review

Hot Fuzz is one of my favorite movies of all time. Shaun of the Dead is in my mental top-ten list. Naturally, a third and final movie in this lineup would have some pretty big shoes to fill. As great as The World's End is, it unfortunately does fall prey to some typical symptoms of sequelitis. In the end, it rounds out the trilogy created by Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in a way only Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost could: with lots of violence, lots of quick smash cuts, and lots of witty humor that the trilogy has come to be defined by and redefine itself in the movie/television/Youtube business.

Youtube business, you ask yourself? Shaun of the Dead came out back in 2004, and was defined by something Edgar Wright created back then: quick, less than a second shots of successive actions that took place, be it a character getting up in the morning or something similar. We have all been exposed to this in some way or another nowadays; watch any vlog-style video on Youtube where somebody is talking to the camera, and if there are quick cuts between what the person is saying or a train of thought, you'll have found what I mean. It's aim is two-fold: firstly it achieves a certain humoristic effect where a subject's reaction to something or someone can quickly be shown, secondly it reflects our societies constantly decreasing attention-span. Of course I would be hard-pressed to say that Edgar Wright is the reason every movie or video nowadays looks like this; Shaun of the Dead was a relatively small movie, with humor that only appealed to a relatively small niche of people. It's hard to deny though how much this style of humor has gained in popularity over the course of the Cornetto-Trilogy's life-span.

The World's End doesn't differ too much from the equation. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost portray characters that don't see things eye-to-eye, but through a conflict that both have to overcome, in this case a city infested by robot-like creatures, they work together and finally forgive each other for their mistakes. Following them is a slew of supporting characters that all overcome their own indifferences, and could all be fleshed out into their own self-standing movies, Tarantino-style. Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan, and Rosamund Pike all round off the cast, avoiding the problem Hot Fuzz had by filling an entire police station and town with too many characters for anybody to remember (except for me, who's seen the movie at least four dozen times). I felt like Frost did a comparably better job at playing a new kind of character this time around than Pegg, who seemed like he was Frost's foil instead of the other way around.

There's not much to say about the story, given that any trailer has already revealed half of the entire movie. I won't spoil anything, but the ending does make you think in a transcendental, everyday-issues-looked-at-in-a-different-way sort of way and is definitely out of the ordinary. In my opinion, this has much to do with the fact that The World's End isn't trying to emulate a movie genre like the other two movies were; it simply puts two things together that normally wouldn't be put together: a reunion of friends and hand-to-hand combat. As such, the ending had to be as far-fetched as the premise.

In the end, when the trilogy BLu-Ray boxed set comes out and I'd have to introduce a friend to the witty banter of Pegg and Frost and Wright's excellent cinematography, I'd show them one of the other two movies first. On its own, it's hard to say this is a good movie. The action is decent, the writing is sort of weird, and the encapsulating story is far out. But when put in order with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, it's a worthy third movie in the Cornetto trilogy. If there's one thing we've learnt about Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright, it's that they love their pub and that they love their drink.