In the past, Edgar Wright has successfully taken certain Hollywood genres, like cop movies or zombie movies and successfully mixed them with certain aspects about middle-class Englishness like amateur dramatic societies and village fetes.
The World's End tries to do the same with the alien invasion genre of films such as They Live and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which a group of blokes meet up for 20 years after a failed pub crawl in a new town/garden city only to find that the town has been taken over by aliens.
As a premise, there's nothing wrong with it, but in terms of delivery, it's pretty poor. I'm not sure if the production was cursed by the presence of 2 actors from the worst Bond film ever, but the main character lacks the sympathy that Simon Pegg brought to earlier films, the action sequences lack the humor that should have come from middle aged blokes trying to fight aliens and instead they all just look like they've been doing it forever, and are repetitive. And it doesn't have many laughs. It's then let down by an ending that could have been interesting but throws the film away.
It also struck me that Wright doesn't really have much of a grip on English pubs, and how large town pubs were rarely bastions of a choice of guest ales (Wetherspoons actually improved the amount of guest beers in towns). And I'm not sure if it was trying to make a point about certain aspects of modern society, but they really didn't work.
On the plus side, both Pegg and Frost show that they have greater depths of acting ability than have been used before.
Overall, I found it a witless, disappointing film that I would say is a passable way of spending an hour and a half, but not £3.50 of your hard-earned, so I would place in the Wait for TV category.
Debate Magazine
