Flick leaves audience rolling with laughter
Following another summer filled with sequels, “The World’s End” represents a decidedly different take on the comedy franchise. Director Edgar Wright and his leading men collaborators Simon Pegg and Nick Frost return for their third — and possibly final — collaboration following 2004’s “Shaun of the Dead” and 2007’s “Hot Fuzz.”
What the semi-franchise lacks in returning characters or continuing plots, it more than makes up for in recurring gags, overarching themes and a delicious U.K.-specific dessert called a Cornetto. The film follows Pegg as a nostalgic alcoholic determined to get the gang back together for an epic pub crawl, which unexpectedly gets derailed by an otherworldly complication — to avoid spoilers with an understatement. “The World’s End” proves that the third time is as much of a charm as the first and second, with critics praising the longtime collaborators as well as the ensemble they’ve assembled, including Bilbo Baggins himself, Martin Freeman. The comedy’s darker this time around, but it’s expertly handled by director Wright, whose energetic style has only gotten better with experience. This time around, the characters tackle as many real-world obstacles as they do out-of-this-world ones, and the result is a late-summer film that puts the rest of them to shame. Here’s what critics are saying about “The World’s End”: “‘The World’s End’ is the third of Wright’s genre-bending black comedies starring Pegg (who co-wrote it) and Frost, and it’s arguably the best — although who would want to argue over three such beautifully constructed social satires? In this one, Wright and Pegg take a mere half-hour to distill an entire subgenre of American child-man comedies … Wright is an even better director now, and the last half-hour of ‘The World’s End’ is one bravura set piece after another. The action is brilliantly staged and shot, the climax evoking (and equaling) the dizzying nightclub opening of ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.’ The all-star cast is perfection.” “The duo [Simon Pegg and Nick Frost] show a real gift for creating characters that can still bicker and needle each other in a very specific way even while running for their lives, and the blokes here get ample opportunity to do so. In large and small ways, this ensemble understands the rhythms of how old friends interact — and how easy it is to revert to your adolescent identity, no matter how far from it you’ve run as an adult … Pegg and Frost do some of their best work themselves, completely avoiding repetitions of their earlier collaborations with Wright; Frost gets to be the intelligent, responsible one this time out, while Pegg plays the boozy screw-up.”