The end of the Cornetto

My best girl and I went to see the final in the three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy;  The Worlds End.  The first two  Shaun of the Dead  and  Hot Fuzz  were both brilliant homages to the Zombie genre and the buddy cop film respectively. Both filled with great pop culture references and both fantastically funny.

So Zombies, cults, and ice cream so far, what did the The Worlds End have to offer? Lets find out with a synopsis:

It's 1990 and Gary King  is the most popular kid in Newton Haven High School. Gary and his mates decide to go out on the town when school finishes. What follows is an epic pub crawl, the golden mile;  five friends, 12 pubs, girls drinks and fights. They didn't make it to the final pub, but it was the best night of Gary's life. Unfortunatly twenty years later and it is still the best night of  his life.

Gary (Simon Pegg) decides to get the band back together. He convices his reluctant old friends Andy (Nick Frost), Oliver (Martin Freedman) , Peter (Eddie Marsan) and Simon (Paddy Considine) to relive that night and try and make it to the World's End. But Gary has found that his friends have all moved on with their lives, and as the night goes on he finds that the locals are acting very weirdly and seem to have blue blood. But the really crazy thing is no one knows who he is! Madness.

Ensue drunken pub crawling hijinx.

The first thing that struck me about  The World's End  was the reversal in rolses for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Pegg plays the waster twat reminicient of Nick Frost's Character in Shaun.  This film like the others is character driven and also like the other films it is a homage. But more than a tribute to science fiction movies like  Invasion of the Body Snatchers it is a tribute to friendship, and the freedom and stupidity of youth.

I guess at my age we all have a friend or know someone that is still stuck in a bit of a time warp. They wear the same sort of clothes as they always have, listen to the same music and still act like they did in their early twenties. I have some great friends, some of whom I don't speak to for ages, but when we do catch up we just pick up where we left off. It is always fun to catch up for a pint, but the days of staggering in at some ungodly hour reeking of the girl you snogged out side the Univeristy pub (ours was called the Bongo) are over. Now we are all professional parents now with kids, mortages etc.Guys like Gary fade from our lives because we just don't have time for them any more, or they are just dick heads, funny at 19, bloody irratating at 40. So the story is quite evocative.

The screen play is well written and of the calibre we expect from Pegg and Wright, and like the other films character driven with great actors. Pierce Brosnan as the old guidence counsellor is terriffic, and there is a fun cameo by Rafe Spall. The ending is interesting, and not what I expected. But I think very appropriate given the nature of the film, but enough about that.

The fight choreography is really good, surprisingly good when you consider it is with five middle aged comedians. Nick Frost and Simon Pegg showing off their skills, or maybe just their experiences in pubs.

 The Worlds End  is a funny drunken romp down memory lane, if everyone you ever remembered living on that lane was replaced by an alien copy. If you liked the other two you will definetly enjoy this.

 I give it seven drunken Monkeys.
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