Great excitement surrounds the release of any Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright project, but buzz about The World’s End had been quietly rumbling for years. The guys are superstars in their home country, seen by most folks under forty as probably the shining lights of the British comedy film industry, a phrase that you don’t hear mentioned very often as British comedy films are dire nowadays. We last saw Simon Pegg and Nick Frost together in the slightly underwhelming alien-comedy Paul, the relative disappointment of which only served to heighten speculation about just how good The World’s End could possibly be.
Well? How good could it possible be?
I think even the most rabid Cornetto trilogy fans would admit that The World’s End is the least impressive of the series, but when you’re up against Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, that’s no big deal. I’d say that The World’s End would have been the British comedy of the year, had it not been beaten to the punch by the misadventures of a certain Norfolk-based DJ. It suffers from the same problems as The Godfather III – where the first two films are iconic, and the third only very very good, so it’s bound to pale in comparison.
That said, The World’s End does have certain strengths – as the last installment of the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, it strikes a bittersweet note that tempers the comedy moments, anchoring it in melancholy. At its heart, The World’s End is about the gentrification of little towns and how everywhere, in the UK at least, seems to be losing its individuality. The little pubs shown in the beginning of the film are gradually losing out to heartless chain pubs, more interested in serving overpriced gourmet food than cultivating anything interesting or worthwhile. That it does this via the medium of science fiction is to be commended, and shows that genre cinema – when done correctly – is capable of great depth and feeling.
