With each film, from Shaun
of the Dead to Hot Fuzz to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the
increasingly brilliant director Edgar Wright has pushed his zippy, energetic
pop art precision further. His overt genre exercises gain their momentum and
their hilarity from the way he points his camera, frames the action, and edits
away, often getting big laughs with nothing more than a perfectly timed cut or
a sight gag of staging. His newest film is The
World’s End and it may be his best film yet, as unexpectedly moving as it
is an endlessly entertaining blast of fun.
It’s immediately obvious that we’re watching a Wright film.
The unchecked personality in the breakneck pace, visual flourishes, and crisply
energetic montage reveal that right away. But unlike his zombie and buddy cop
satires and his graphic novel adaptation, this is a film that sets out to play
it straight – for a while, at least. The
World’s End is an often hilarious dramedy about aging, growing into
maturity, and the arrested development of hanging onto the memory of old times
to the detriment of making new ones, centering on a group of teenage friends
who drifted apart and are brought back together in the midst of middle age in
an attempt to recapture some youthful fun.
The man who brings them together again used to be the king
of their group, the guy with the fun ideas, the outsized personality that
everyone followed around. When they were 18, he led them on an attempted
pub-crawl through their small hometown – 12 pubs in all. Needless to say, they
didn’t finish, but sure had fun anyway. Now it’s over twenty years later, and
he’s starting to realize that what he thought at the time was the best night of
his life actually ended up being the best night of his life. Why’d he have to
peak so early? Now he’s consumed by the need to relive the night and finish the
crawl, a pint at every pub, right down to the twelfth and final stop that
alluded them all those years ago: The World’s End.
In the briskly expositional and very funny opening sequences
of the film, this down-on-his-luck guy (Simon Pegg) whirls his way back into
the lives of his buddies, now businessmen (Eddie Marsan, Paddy Considine),
realtors (Martin Freeman), and lawyers (Nick Frost). They don’t quite know what
to make of their friend, still driving his old clunker, listening to his high
school-era mix tapes, and eager to return to their hometown. “It’s so boring
there,” one of them says. His response is quick on his tongue: “Yeah, because we’re not there!” Once there they find
that the sleepy little town is exactly the same except very different. The film
is built around the simple observation that returning to your hometown after
some time away is an odd experience.
It’s not just the samey corporatized restaurant scene –
“Stop Starbucksing us!” one character shouts – that seems odd. Sure, the old
conspiracy theorist (David Bradley) is nursing his drink at his favorite pub and their old
English teacher (Pierce Brosnan) is still hanging around. But the place seems
smaller and less welcoming. Why, it’s as if no one even remembers this group of
guys. They felt like they ran the place then, but not so anymore. Time moved on
and moves on. Beginning their pub-crawl, the guys fall back into old patterns
of patter at times, bristling at others. They’re stuck somewhere between
reminiscing and forging new bonds after being apart for so long. Do they revert
to the boys they were or get to know each other as the men they now are? The
terrific ensemble maintains terrific chemistry, sparkling through each scene
with a genuine sense of a mix of youthful camaraderie and middle-aged
resignation. Pegg’s excellent performance – so squirrely and wounded – pulls
them in a boyish direction. Most of the others aren’t so definitive, warm but
professional, straining to put up with the man they used to call “friend.” The
marvelously witty script (co-written by Wright and Pegg) bounces their
personalities off the scenarios and each other in pleasing and telling patter.
These guys, as well as a welcome Rosamund Pike as an old
friend who meets up with them, form a richly sympathetic and massively likable
core around which just about anything could happen. Funny thing is, that’s
precisely what happens. The World’s End
so buoyantly and confidently skips off the tracks of its apparent genre and
lands in another without missing a beat. I can’t wait to see it again, not just
to get caught up in how hugely entertaining the whole thing is, but to marvel
at how smoothly and seemingly effortlessly it makes its transitions. The setup
is golden, and could easily have sustained a feature on its own, although it’d
have been a significantly less overtly dazzling one. Where it goes from there
is as wholly satisfying as it is unexpected. To that end, avoid the advertising
for the film, which I was sad to discover gives up the whole premise. Not since
The Truman Show has an ad campaign so
thoroughly defanged a movie’s central potent surprises. If you go in knowing
only that it’s a very funny character-based Edgar Wright film, you might get
the mouth-agape goofy-grin reaction that I had. Better yet, you might be like
the guy a few rows back from me who shouted “What!?” during one pivotal
development.
What Wright and company have in store involves taking the
film’s powerful subtext and exploding it outwards as stirring, exciting,
wonderfully silly metaphor, as if John Carpenter directed The Big Chill as rewritten by Douglas Adams. But that’s not exactly
true, is it? This is pure Wright all the way. It’s a film that descends into
the kind of action-packed genre silliness so hugely entertaining and expertly
choreographed that you wish more big crowd-pleasing films were so dedicated to
genuine surprises, a sense of discovery, and twists that are at once unexpected
and wild while still making sense in the context of richly developed characters.
That sounds like an Edgar Wright film to me.
In a summer where so many movies seemed to drift towards an
inevitable autopilot conclusion, it’s a relief to find a film that grows only
more unpredictable and satisfying as it goes along. There’s a real sense of the
joy of the movies in every frame. It’s a freewheeling film of banter and
slapstick – equally giddy and skillful in execution – that never loses track of
its generous and genuine heart. It’s an inventive, tricky movie, the biggest
trick of which is how straightforward it all is when you think about it. The World’s End ends with an entirely
unanticipated series of moments thrilling, gentle, and a little goofy, too.
There’s a sense that, although these characters are no longer juvenile, it’s
hardly the end of the world.
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