The World's End (2013)

THE WORLD'S END  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Edgar Wright
    Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman,
    Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan, Rosamund Pike,
    David Bradley, Michael Smiley, Pierce Brosnan
This starts out being one kind of movie, and then becomes another kind of movie, and then becomes something else again by combining the first two and throwing in a bunch of other stuff besides. It's about five old friends, all closing in on 40, who get together to recreate an epic pub crawl they failed to complete 20 years before. 12 pints in 12 pubs in a single night. Good luck with that. The instigator and ringleader, then and now, is seedy-looking, trench-coated Gary King (Simon Pegg). The others have all moved on to respectable, middle-class lives, but not Gary, who's still clinging to and hoping to relive that night in the increasingly distant past when he and his mates made their legendary assault on the "Golden Mile". Nobody else thinks repeating that night is even a good idea - one of the guys hasn't had a drink in 16 years - but then the old camaraderie kicks in, or what's left of it, and nobody can say no to the King. So they're off. That takes care of the first part of the movie. There's an abrupt gear shift about 30 minutes in that will surprise nobody who's familiar with the previous work of fanboys Pegg, Wright and Frost. It's the third entry in their "Cornetto" trilogy, and arguably the most ambitious. There might be fewer genre-parody laughs than in "Hot Fuzz" or "Shaun of the Dead", but despite its ragged structure and throw-it-all-at-the-wall approach, "The World's End" holds up fairly well as a genre piece on its own, and there's more room for the actors, especially the desperately keyed-up Pegg, to slip into the lives of their characters. You don't quite know where it's going to go, but with these guys tapping the lager and throwing back shots from one watering hole to the next, you know you'll be in good hands getting there.