Film Review: The World’s End

The apocalypse is nigh in The World’s End, the concluding chapter of director Edgar Wright and actor Simon Pegg’s so-called Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, which began with the hilarious Shaun Of The Dead then stuttered with Hot Fuzz.

By The Newsroom

Published 24th Jul 2013, 16:30 BST- 1 min read

Nick Frost as Andrew Knightley, Eddie Marsan as Pater, Simon Pegg as Gary King, Paddy Considine as Steven and Martin Freeman as Oliver

Alas, the third time is a charmless exercise in male bonding, spiked with elements of The Stepford Wives as five childhood pals reunite to complete a legendary pub crawl in their sleepy hometown only to discover the locals have been replaced by robots.

The film’s fictional community of Newton Haven boasts the UK’s first roundabout, built circa 1909, and Wright and Pegg’s haphazard script fittingly goes round in circles as the co-writers attempt in vain to bring their hotch-potch of madcap ideas to satisfying fruition. The tone veers wildly between sci-fi, comedy, action and horror, anchored by an exuberant performance from Pegg as the most instantly unlikeable and irritating anti-hero to swagger out of British cinema in recent memory. If it’s wrong to want a character dead within the first five minutes then I plead guilty now.