The World's End review: Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's new film is a very fun night ...

By Brian Viner

PUBLISHED: 14:57 EST, 18 July 2013 | UPDATED: 02:43 EST, 19 July 2013

Rating:

Verdict: A heady brew

A gang of mates hook up together after some years apart and try, with only partial success, to recreate old times.

That is the story of The World's End, both in front of the camera and behind it, for it brings together the team behind Shaun Of The Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), completing their notional 'Cornetto Trilogy' with another parody of a popular Hollywood genre, in this case the Armageddon movie.

Director Edgar Wright has exhorted reviewers not to give too much away, but the clue is in the title.

The gang consists of Gary (Simon Pegg), Andy (Nick Frost), Steven (Paddy Considine), Oliver (Martin Freeman) and Peter (Eddie Marsan).

It is a formidable quintet and they mostly convince as former teenage friends reluctantly reunited by the irrepressible but emotionally stunted and all together maddening Gary, whose dearest wish is for them to complete the epic pub crawl on which they embarked, but failed to finish, on June 22, 1990.

Much against their better judgment, the other four - all of whom have settled into respectable, responsibl e middle age - return with Gary to their home town of Newton Haven and set out on the crawl of ten pubs known as the 'golden mile', of which the last is The World's End (top marks to co-writers Pegg and Wright for creative use of the double-entendre).

But as they tick off the watering holes on their list, and as Gary and Steven become reacquainted with the girl they both used to fancy, Oliver's sister Sam (Rosamund Pike), they begin to realise that - in that time-honoured phrase of film publicists trying desperately to keep intrigue alive - all is not as it seems.

The World's End is nothing if not ambitious, trying to blend knockabout comedy with the desperate poignancy of men scrabbling to rekindle a lost youth, and while they're at it (with apologies to Mr Wright), to fight off sinister alien robots.

The breadth of the film's ambition gets the better of it in many ways, but let me tip my hat to the fight-scene choreographers and in particular the specialeffects team, which has done a remarkable job. Ray Harryhausen, the emeritus wizard of Hollywood special effects who died a couple of months ago, must be looking down with delight from the celestial editing suite.

Delight and surprise, for the film starts out as a standard, rather parochially British buddy flick, taking a good half-hour for the whizz-bang stuff to get going.

That it does comes as something of a relief, because a pub crawl can soon lose its appeal when, like the average cinema audience, you're sober.

There are some nice visual gags (the first couple of pub interiors are exactly the same, a satirical nod towards the dispiriting influence of character sapping chains). But neither those, nor a script sometimes straining a little too hard for the kind of humorous banter in which five old schoolpals might actual ly indulge, manage to overcome the feeling that the plot needs a fresh dimension. It certainly gets one.

For all its flaws, The World's End is fun. It's not as appealing as Shaun Of The Dead, but I preferred it to Hot Fuzz. Maybe that's because I'm about to get together with a bunch of old college friends for our annual reunion and the notion of middle-aged blokes searching for their 20-year-old selves is not entirely alien to me.

Not as alien as those robots, anyway. But I don't think i'm meant to mention those.

www.yahootrend.com