The World's End

Earlier this year, “This is the End” served as something of a finale on the man-child comedies that have defined the last 10 years or so of Hollywood comedies. It did so in such spectacularly silly fashion that it seemed as though no movie again should try and top it.

“The World’s End” too marks a different conclusion. It’s the last in the Cornetto Trilogy, a series of Edgar Wright parody films that started with “Shaun of the Dead,” continued with “Hot Fuzz” and took a break during “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.” Writers and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost along with Wright branded a completely new approach to the parody film, one that was slick, stylish and action heavy.

But like “This is the End,” the juvenile fun and spastic, hyper kinetic style seems to be behind Wright, Pegg and Frost. The characters in “The World’s End” are more mature, the consequences and emotions are more genuine, and the film seems less like an homage to apocalyptic movies and more like a heartfelt throwback.

Pegg plays Gary King, a wonderfully soliloquizing pack leader trapped in his teenage glory days. In an AA meeting, he reflects upon an epic bar crawl from his last day of high school: 12 pubs, 12 pints, but one he never finished. He now seeks to return home and finish the quest with four of his old mates, all of whom have matured and settled into comfy jobs and families while he’s kept his old car, cassette player and selective memories.

He’s completely glossed over a harrowing accident that almost killed his best friend Andy (Frost), one that’s never shown but only hinted at as the group gets drunker and more candid.

It’s something of a role reversal for the two. Pegg has played the straight man in both “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” to Frost’s stoner mentality, but now Andy nor Pegg are strictly the layabouts, the losers or the screw-ups; one has grown up and the other has stayed put, and because Andy’s relationship with Gary isn’t one of tolerance but near contempt, it drives the emotional core of the film.

And yet the real fun of “The World’s End” is that as they go about their pub crawl, they quickly discover that the whole town has been taken over by stilted robots. In addition to being a way for Pegg and Frost to pummel people with limbs and smash heads open into explosions of blue gel, it also serves as a metaphor for the imperfections that give us our identity and make us human.

Wright has never been afraid to make these character themes such a prominent part of these outrageous comedies, but he always earns it, particularly in a scene where the four remaining heroes show that they are humans with literal scars.

Their identity is strongly defined in Pegg and Frost’s rich lexicon of dialogue that goes beyond British-isms: “Let’s Boo-Boo,” he says as an obtuse way of saying “time to go,” or “We’ll always have the disableds,” a smart throwback to having sex in the pub’s shared bathroom.

One hopes that Wright won’t forget his stylish, colorful and musical roots in his future films, including the Marvel comic adaptation “Ant Man,” or that Pegg, Frost and Wright will reunite once more for something equally epic. But there’s a sense that their Cornetto days will now be a cherished bit of nostalgia.

3 stars