The World’s End, the concluding part of Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, was one of the summer’s great pleasures for a few, significant reasons. 1. It is a comedy that is actually funny and has better, funnier jokes than the ones present in the trailers (a rarity). 2. It is a movie that is genuinely heartfelt, completely uncynical and lovingly made. It cares about its characters and wants the audience to care about them too (again, a rarity). And 3. It more than lives up to the high standards and reputation of its predecessors.
This is precision comedy, structured meticulously and edited to within an inch of its life. We’ve become infuriatingly inured to the idea of mainstream comedy being lazily plotted and over-reliant on self-indulgent, unfunny, unrehearsed improvisation, so it is great to see an example of the genre where the plot is just as important as the gags and where improv is practically non-existent. It also helps that we have some great performances here. Pegg gives the best performance of his career so far as the frozen-in-time Gary King, the character who starts out as irritating man-child but slowly develops into tragi-comic hero. Eddie Marsan, Paddy Considine and Martin Freeman (all of whom have been under-appreciated by many reviewers in the US) never feel like third wheels in the Pegg/Frost bromance, with each performer entirely justifying their right to share the screen by perfectly mediating the two extremes of Pegg and Frost’s characters.
It is, however, the aforementioned Nick Frost who truly shines the most here as Andy, a character who has more pathos than most characters you would find in any dramatic film. Frost is the one amongst the trilogy’s founding trio who has grown the most as a performer, and after viewing The World’s End, it’s clear that it is Frost who has always been the beating heart of this magnificent, consistently hilarious trilogy.
No film this year has been perhaps more polarizing than Nicolas Winding Refn’s staggering Only God Forgives. There are those who loath it and those who love it, with very few people falling in between, and that’s part of what makes the film so extraordinary. Indeed, it seems most of its critics are upset that Only God Forgives is not a semi-spritual sequel to Drive, and this is something Refn perhaps intended. He sets up that expectation only to quickly pull the rug out from under your feet and serve up something which is equally, if not more, fascinating.
There are certain tropes that cross over: the laconic performance from Gosling, the neon-soaked visuals, a throbbingly visceral score from Cliff Martinez and a scene-stealing, against-type performance from a well established actor. But that’s where the similarities end. Drive was a low-key thriller with a very firm awareness of pulpy genre fare. Only God Forgives, meanwhile, is perhaps closer to the works of surrealist cinema, with the meaning and understanding of the film being reliant on what is seen rather than what is said. Unless, of course, the dialogue belongs to Kristin Scott Thomas. Her powerful, domineering matriarch is not a million miles away from the stuck up, upper class toff characters that made her name, but it is a credit to Refn that he could mine that bitchiness into something far more left field, far more terrifying and far more imaginatively foul-mouthed. She steals the movie right out from under Ryan Gosling’s nose.
I can understand why some people were turned off by Only God Forgives – the long silences and lack of any explanation alone will test even the most patient of viewers – but if you choose to go with it and embrace its Lynchian/folkloric style, you will be treated to one of the most unique viewing experiences of the year. Allow the dynamic visuals, the Thai singing, the brutal ultra-violence and the unbelievable performance of Kristin Scott Thomas to wash over you, and bask in the work of one of cinema’s most assured and talented pranksters.
— Will Chadwick
