Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are truly passionate comedians and as such, they're of course testing new characters for themselves in every one of their productions. However, just as not every role the legendary Monty Python crew tried out in their sketches worked out to a phenomenal gag, the two talented Britons also have to experience that some of their creations are too exaggerated and weird from time to time. It's just that John Cleese, Graham Chapman et al. represented an innumerable amount of different characters in their day that made a couple of glitches easy to ignore, while Pegg and Frost carry one of those through a full-length film – and then, a one-off doesn't come in very handy.
One of these occurs in The World's End, the duo's sci-fi spoof that features a ton of indulgence in alcohol in addition. In it, Pegg is a dark-haired, arrogant, and alpha male alcoholic stuck in the 90's, while Frost puts on the outfit of a teetotal, contemptuous square that undergoes one of the least believable character changes in film history in the final third. They are assisted by a hardly challenged Martin Freeman (who on earth had the idea that his consistently uttering "WTF?" would be anywhere near funny), a forgettably uninteresting Paddy Considine, and an Eddie Marsan that is to terribly out of place in this film that it physically hurts me. The bundle is topped off by a lovely Rosamund Pike who, just as so many other well-known faces appearing here and there for a cameo, just doesn't have any tangible purpose for being in the picture. I couldn't care less about all that if they had been given witty or just merely amusing stuff to work with, but mostly, that just isn't the case in The World's End, a comedy with an admirable but dull lot of martial arts, head-bashing, and dramatic stand-offs, but a disappointingly small amount of jokes that work.
Exactly as it was with the first two films of the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy this film completes, the gags are a lot better and more frequent in the first half of the whole thing, whereas they make room for seemingly never-ending combat of any kind in the latter part, merely there to give director Edgar Wright some fun in his admittedly creative directing of it. And even though I'm not a fan of that at all, I have to say that I fully enjoyed The World's End during all of its 110 minutes of running time because Wright and his crew managed to make it entertaining despite all its silliness, disproportionality, and lack of big laughs. In the end though, just as money doesn't equal happiness, a good time at the movies doesn't equal a good movie, leading to The World's End being at least better than 2013's other doomsday spoof (how I wish to forget having ever seen This Is the End), but not more than mediocre itself.
One of these occurs in The World's End, the duo's sci-fi spoof that features a ton of indulgence in alcohol in addition. In it, Pegg is a dark-haired, arrogant, and alpha male alcoholic stuck in the 90's, while Frost puts on the outfit of a teetotal, contemptuous square that undergoes one of the least believable character changes in film history in the final third. They are assisted by a hardly challenged Martin Freeman (who on earth had the idea that his consistently uttering "WTF?" would be anywhere near funny), a forgettably uninteresting Paddy Considine, and an Eddie Marsan that is to terribly out of place in this film that it physically hurts me. The bundle is topped off by a lovely Rosamund Pike who, just as so many other well-known faces appearing here and there for a cameo, just doesn't have any tangible purpose for being in the picture. I couldn't care less about all that if they had been given witty or just merely amusing stuff to work with, but mostly, that just isn't the case in The World's End, a comedy with an admirable but dull lot of martial arts, head-bashing, and dramatic stand-offs, but a disappointingly small amount of jokes that work.
Exactly as it was with the first two films of the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy this film completes, the gags are a lot better and more frequent in the first half of the whole thing, whereas they make room for seemingly never-ending combat of any kind in the latter part, merely there to give director Edgar Wright some fun in his admittedly creative directing of it. And even though I'm not a fan of that at all, I have to say that I fully enjoyed The World's End during all of its 110 minutes of running time because Wright and his crew managed to make it entertaining despite all its silliness, disproportionality, and lack of big laughs. In the end though, just as money doesn't equal happiness, a good time at the movies doesn't equal a good movie, leading to The World's End being at least better than 2013's other doomsday spoof (how I wish to forget having ever seen This Is the End), but not more than mediocre itself.