All five are confronted with the brutal, well-trodden truth: just because you’ve left your hometown doesn’t mean you deserve the welcome of a conquering hero when you come back.Īnd it's their overt insecurities despite decades of so-called maturity that stick in you so deeply. Oliver's sister Sam (Rosamund Pike), who hooked up with 18-year-old Gary King on the first time around, joins them in the homecoming, only to swiftly extinguish King's rematch hopes. Flinging himself off the wagon, he uses an assortment of half-truths, complete lies, and money-shuffling to get his four best friends – Peter (Eddie Marsan), Steven (Paddy Considine), Oliver (Freeman) and Andy (Frost), none of whom have heard from Gary in about 20 years – on-board to try the Golden Mile all over it again.Ĭall it regression – for some people, high school never really ends – but he convinces all of them to join in, and they return to the sleepy, fictional 'burb of Newton Haven only to find that the quirky pubs they once knew have been "Starbucksed" since they've been gone: the bartenders have forgotten them, the menus are all identical, and each pub only has one type of beer on draft.
And true to form, The World's End is no different from its predecessors when it comes to its aging man-child themes (grow up, don't be a dick, get drunk with your friends), recurring jokes (the fences, the circular banter, the infamous Cornetto cones), and impeccable timing for which the Cornetto Crew are revered.Īmidst bizarre, horn-driven intro music peppered with WWII-era sound-bytes about liberation and "getting loaded," we meet Gary King (Pegg), a drug-addled, would-be Peter Pan, who realizes mid-support group that his life never got better than the night his gang finished high school and attempted that vaunted 12-pub crawl, the Golden Mile. If you've seen the World's End trailer, you know what it's about: Four childhood bros, now boring and pushing 40, somehow get convinced by their former ringleader to recreate a bonkers pub crawl they first attempted when they were 18. The genius of the Cornetto film lies in their knowledge of and subsequent ability to improvise within known genres and structures. The third installment of their nerd-powered opus revolves around a return to the modest, suburban upbringings of its characters, another reliable trope at the multiplex – except in this flick Wright and Pegg decided to set it on fire. The World's End is no different, except that this one is hidden in the guise of an apocalypse flick. The World's End is the culmination of the Wright and Pegg trilogy, which also includes Shaun of the Dead (2004), and Hot Fuzz (2007), two cult-favorite stories about modern life delivered via the Trojan horse of a genre film – a zombie flick for Shaun, a buddy-cop picture for Fuzz. That glorious adolescent purgatory is one of Western storytelling’s most beloved tools, so it’s only fitting that cult film heroes Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have decided to wrap up their so-called Three Flavors Cornetto trilogy with a final installment that, on its surface, is about a handful of grown men getting hammered in the midst of a condescending alien takeover, but at its core, it's about the exact opposite. No, not 18th century France, but the experience of being 18 years old - that emotionally magnified fulcrum in life from whence everyone, supposedly, takes off. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
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