'The World's End' is the 3rd and final movie in director Edgar Wright's "Three Flavors Cornetto" Trilogy, a play on Krzysztof Kieslowski's 'Three Colors Trilogy'. A lose triad held together by leads Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, overlapping supporting cast, meta-genra send up, and references to or appearances by Cornetto brand ice-cream treats. Though this might as well be called the 'Fence Jump' Trilogy, as each film contains a scene of suburban fence jumping, to varying degrees of jumping success.
While I am rather fond of the earlier films in the trilogy, 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz', I can not say the same for 'The World's End'. I actively disliked large portions of this. A slog whose ideas never quite come together, this just didn't jell with me. Five old high-school friends get together 23 years later and attempt to finish an aborted pub crawl. We are first presented with a kind of dramadey about failure, but the film collides with another type of movie around 39 minutes in, when we learn townspeople have been replaced by... let's call them robots.
Hitchcock or Sturges could pull a major tonal/genera shift like this off, while Wright's just doesn't land. This is somewhat surprising because Edger was so skilled at genra melding in the previous two films in the trilogy. I found too much of the film to be, well, annoying. Long on promise, short on delivery. It also lacked a character I liked enough to really latch onto.
While the ending also didn't quite work for me, I admired its audacity, an interesting failure in a movie that is mostly just failure. *1/2
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