The World’s End (***)

Some people are calling this the third in a trilogy, because it’s the third movie, after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, from the team of Edgar Wright (writer/director), Simon Pegg (writer/actor), and Nick Frost (actor). The only other thing that unite them is their certain brand of bro-centric humor, sometimes smart but rarely highbrow, frequently vulgar but not too low-brow (i.e. a minimum of pratfalls and jokes about body functions). Unlike the other two films, this is not really a genre parody, though it could be argued that there’ve been so many movies about groups of men trying to recapture their lost youth that it constitutes a genre of its own, and it is the expectations of those of those films (Old School, Wild Hogs, The Hangover, etc.) that are being subverted.

In this one, the story centers on five 40-year-olds who set out to re-create a legendary 12-stop pub crawl (the “Golden Mile”) that they failed to complete back in 1990. Pegg plays Gary King, the de facto leader of this bunch. Where the other men, played by Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, and Eddie Marsan, have moved on with their lives, King has gone from the 12-stop program to the 12-step one, and doesn’t like it. So, he gathers up the old gang to return to his hometown and finish what was started.

The World’s End turns out to be the name of the last pub, the rest of which have names like The Trusty Servant and The Two-Headed Dog.

IMDb link

viewed 9/22/13 2:00 pm at Riverview; posted 9/23/13