Blu-ray Review: The World's End (2013)

Now Available to Own   



Photo Slideshow
   

A postmodern version of an epic Arthurian quest lays just below the surface of as you like it hilarity in The World's End, the third and final installment of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's Three Flavors Cornetto trilogy of sorts.

Wright's own junk food hangover cure he referenced along with co-writer Simon Pegg in their slacker vs. zombie cult classic Shaun of the Dead and then devoured onscreen in their Midsomer-like village set Michael Bay actioner Hot Fuzz, it's only fitting that the hangover cure come full circle for use in a film about the ultimate pub crawl.

 

Yet just like an inebriated man with beer goggles, it's safe to say that a good many will watch The World's End drunk on the overflowing humor and only begin to peel back the layers after it's finished. And not only do Wright and Pegg seem fine with that but they damn near count on it, building a vastly intoxicating behind-the-scenes Blu-ray experience that's almost as enjoyable as the film itself.

Guiding you through every aspect of the moviemaking process in more than three hours worth of footage, the two walk you through the insanely detailed, screenplay blueprint flip-chart, pointing out all of the signs and omens audibly and visually, before giving every department and/or topic its due.

With the benefit of knowledge meeting you halfway with your sense of humor already engaged -- it's safe to say that just like the film's main character, you're sure to want to go on the pub crawl a second time with fresh eyes as opposed to solely under the influence of beer (or humor) goggles.

Centering the onscreen quest on a very different King than Arthur, we're introduced to Pegg's irresponsible, overgrown adolescence in arrested development Gary King, who first brings us up to speed wearing rose colored glasses.

 

Reliving the greatest night of his life embarking on The Golden Mile pub crawl with his four best mates after graduating high school, Gary happily idealizes the past before a comment from a fellow addiction anonymous group member plants the seed of dissatisfaction in his middle-aged life.

Having failed to make it to all twelve of the pubs that make up the Mile in the past, Gary sets off -- determined to get the old band back together... well, not literally since he'd sold their instruments to buy drugs ages ago and all of the other men are in respectable careers now.

 

Manipulating each man with various tales until they bend to his will, the five knights embark not on horseback but via his vintage car nicknamed the Beast complete with a killer late '80s/early '90s mix-tape blasting away mile after mile.

While it doesn't seem to have a lot to offer in the way of plot -- at least initially -- things start going from strange to worse shortly into their Mile journey from one Tarot-card like symbolized, ominously named pub to the next all the way through to the titular World's End.

 

From the corporations that have taken over the pubs so that they've all begun to look the same to the bizarre behavior of the locals (moving in concert -- conformity and group-think gone haywire), our heroes begin to realize things aren't like they used to be.

And even though there's always the question of whether or not you can really go home again, the widening gap between us vs. them (or the heroes vs. the "blanks" as they come to be called) come to the forefront shortly after they begin slamming down pints as embodied in an apocalyptic twist midway through the movie.

 

Realizing they must come together to save the town from annihilation one pub patron at a time, Gary's pub crawl takes on a far more epic meaning as he and the others struggle to make it to the final destination of The World's End alive.

Actually, "blanks" turns out to be a great word as issues of any prejudice can be used to literally fill-in-the-blank if you want to read deeper into the movie (and indeed, are teased in a tongue-in-cheek conclusion as well). However, just like appreciating the humor first and the layers later, the apocalyptic comedic horror smackdown soon takes center stage over anything else, dominating your brain-space for the rest of the film.

 

An enjoyable romp that intriguingly pays off on the previous two films as we discover the way the blanks multiplied has zombie-ish similarities and reveling in the same type of over-the-top action we witnessed in Fuzz, The World's End marks a surprisingly soulful conclusion to the trilogy-in-jest.

 

While I still have a special place in my heart for Fuzz, in a year over-crowded with topically similar movies of every genre, comically speaking it's The World's End rather than This is the End that I think I'd sooner grab hold of a second time for a night of apocalyptical hilarity ever after.

Related Review

Hot Fuzz

     

Text ©2013, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Hot Fuzz

Related Review:
The World's End

Director: Edgar Wright

Bad Brits, Bad Brits, Whatcha Gonna Do?

In this inventive spoof of American buddy cop films, the Shaun of the Dead duo (Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright) reunite for Hot Fuzz bringing their distinctive blend of hyper cuts, ironic dialogue matched with contradictory images and witty banter to a film that I liked even more than their previous one.

Pegg stars as Nicholas Angell, the literal "Goody Two Shoes" London police officer (the song even plays during his introduction) whose arrest record is 400% higher than any other officer in the entire department. In the simplest terms, the prodigy with the badge is not only a criminal’s worst nightmare but that of his coworkers as well and, tired of looking like slackers, they give him a promotion and send him off to a country department in Sanford, a town with low crime but increasingly deadly accidents that Nicholas quickly believes to be foul play, making him unpopular in his new community.

Of course, this isn’t helped by the fact that on his first night there, he arrests what seems to be half the town for various offenses, only to realize that one of the men he apprehended is to be his new partner, the eager and hilarious Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), son of the Inspector who plies his partner with questions about carnage and danger.

In a humorous play on the homoerotic subtext of cop films made in the states, Butterman invites Angell in for a night of drinking together on the sofa during a cozy double feature of Point Break and Bad Boys II that seems all the more entertaining after discovering on IMDb that early drafts of Hot Fuzz had given Angell a love interest who was cut from the shooting script but lots of her original dialogue was given instead to Butterman “often without any changes.”

Featuring great bits by Martin Freeman, Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan and two nearly unrecognizable cameos by Cate Blanchett and Peter Jackson, the film also offers up two juicy roles for Timothy Dalton as a sadistic grocery store owner and Jim Broadbent as the Inspector unsure of how to deal with his new employee, other than making sure he enforces the swear box policy. A movie that, like Mike Judge’s Office Space, is sure to draw an even bigger following on DVD, Hot Fuzz is best shared with friends, especially those up on their 80’s and 90’s American cop movies.