- UK release: July 2013
- Director: Edgar Wright · Writers: Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright
- Studio / distributor: Working Title; Big Talk; Focus Features
- Genre: Science-fiction comedy / pub-crawl apocalypse · Runtime: 109 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) as Gary King; Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Paul) as Andy Knightley; Rosamund Pike (Die Another Day, An Education) as Sam Chamberlain; Martin Freeman (The Hobbit, Sherlock) as Oliver Chamberlain
- Rotten Tomatoes: 89% critics / 71% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
The Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy ends where the other two could not quite go. Shaun of the Dead (2004) used the zombie film to talk about a man who would rather not grow up; Hot Fuzz (2007) used the buddy-cop film to talk about a town that has decided niceness is worth killing for. Both wore their sadness lightly under the jokes. The World’s End is the one that lets the sadness show. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have written a science-fiction comedy about a pub crawl, and somewhere around the fourth pint it turns out to be about a man who has nothing in his life except the night twenty years ago when everything was still ahead of him. It is the funniest of the three in places and the bleakest by some distance, and that combination is harder to pull off than the easy charm of the earlier films.
The setup
Gary King (Simon Pegg) is a fortysomething wreck still wearing the same coat and driving the same car he had at eighteen. The high point of his life was the Golden Mile, a twelve-pub crawl through his home town of Newton Haven that he and four schoolfriends never finished. Gary rounds up the others, now respectable men with mortgages and careers who would rather forget him, and bullies them into one more attempt. The reunion is awkward, the nostalgia is mostly his, and then they notice the town is wrong. The locals are too placid, too synchronised, and bleed the wrong colour. Newton Haven has been quietly replaced, and the only people who can see it are five middle-aged men determined to keep drinking through the apocalypse rather than admit the crawl is over.
The cast
This is Pegg cast against his own type, and it is the best thing he has done. Gary King is charming the way a hangover is charming the next morning, a fast-talking liability who has turned arrested development into a personality. Pegg plays him without asking to be liked, which makes the cracks land harder when they show. Nick Frost takes the inversion that runs through the whole film and gives it a body: where he is usually the soft slacker to Pegg’s straight man, here Andy is the wounded grown-up, dry, teetotal and carrying a grudge the script takes its time to explain. Their chemistry has always been the engine of these films, and turning it inside out gives it somewhere new to go. Rosamund Pike brings clarity and old regret as Sam, the one woman foolish enough to have history with Gary, and Martin Freeman’s tightly wound estate agent is a small, precise comic turn. The ensemble plays like men who genuinely went to school together, which is most of the trick.
The craft
Wright remains the most kinetic comedy director working in Britain. The visual grammar is the same one that made the first two films sing: hard cuts on small actions, whip pans, sound gags landed on the frame, set-ups that pay off three scenes later. Bill Pope’s photography keeps the suburban dusk handsome rather than drab, and the fights are a genuine surprise, fast and clean and properly choreographed, with the cast doing enough of it themselves to sell the chaos. Steven Price’s score and a soundtrack of early-nineties indie do the period heavy-lifting without nudging you in the ribs. At 109 minutes it moves, though the back third tips into a long confrontation that talks more than the earlier films would have. The craft is never in doubt; the question is whether you go with the tonal swerve from pub farce to existential argument, and for me it earns it.
How it stacks up
The obvious ancestors are Invasion of the Body Snatchers and They Live, both of which used an alien takeover to say something about conformity, and Wright knows it; the placid replaced townsfolk are a straight line from pod people. What he adds is the very English idea that the thing being defended is not freedom in the abstract but the right to be a shambles, to get it wrong, to stay in the pub. Set against Shaun and Hot Fuzz, this is the one that trusts the audience to sit with discomfort. It is less immediately huggable than either, and a chunk of the audience will miss the warmth, but it is reaching for more.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are well onside, sitting around 89%, with the recurring note that this is the darkest and most mature film of the three, using the invasion to talk about addiction, nostalgia and failure. Audiences are cooler at 71%, and the gap is easy to read: people came for the comfort of the first two films and got handed a portrait of a man drinking himself to a standstill. I think the lower audience number is the more honest measure of how much the film asks of you, not a measure of quality. The melancholy is the feature, not a flaw, but it is fair enough not to want it from a Cornetto film.
Verdict
This is funny, fast and far sadder than its premise lets on, and it rewards a second watch more than the first two because you can see the ending coming in Gary’s every evasion. It loses a little in a talky final stretch and it will not give everyone the warm hit they wanted. What it offers instead is a comedy with a real wound in it, an ensemble that feels lived-in, and a director at the height of his control. It sits just below Shaun of the Dead for me and comfortably in the rewatch pile. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, and the one to complete the trilogy on if you have the boxset coming.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: The World’s End closed the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, and its reputation has gradually warmed as audiences caught up with how deliberate the downbeat ending is; it now tends to be the film admirers of the trilogy argue is the smartest, even if Shaun stays the most loved. Edgar Wright went on to Baby Driver (2017) and Last Night in Soho (2021), and Rosamund Pike’s breakout in Gone Girl (2014) arrived the year after. It is widely available on disc and digital, often bundled as part of the Cornetto trilogy set, and streams on the usual platforms depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong language, violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC release page was unavailable when this review was prepared, so the detailed Content Advice breakdown by category (Violence, Language, Sex, Drugs) could not be retrieved verbatim. The 15 certificate and short advice line above are taken from the film’s UK classification; the full category notes should be confirmed against the BBFC entry before relying on them.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
