The World's End

2013 sci-fi action comedy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Five friends make another attempt at a pub crawl twenty years after their failed first attempt, only to discover that the town has been overtaken by robots. Can they make it to The World's End before the world's end?

Ok, I'm sure I just ended that plot synopsis with a tagline for the movie. I apologize for that, and I want you to know that it was unintentional.

As a fan of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (and Scott Pilgrim, though it's a different beast), I'm not sure why I hesitated to see this. It's got all the right ingredients--Pegg and Frost, a screenplay by Pegg and director Edgar Wright. It just doesn't work nearly as well as its predecessors. Moments are humorous but not really ever funny, action sequences start to feel really redundant, and this hyperkinetically anxious tone is relentless.

Simon Pegg certainly is giving it his all here. Veins are poking out of his neck and forehead for the entire movie, and after a while, I started getting worried that the performance would kill him. The problem isn't the energy with this movie or its performances at all. The problem is that it all becomes a bit grating. I just got a little tired of Pegg and the rest of the crew shouting at me, and the scenes of robot dismemberment and decapitation weren't really a break from it.

There's a subtext here that I would have taken some time to consider if the movie didn't annoy me. This seems to deal with the idea of leaving childhood and all the immaturity attached to childhood behind. Or more specifically, the social norms or other forces that keep a person from staying young. I guess the robots or aliens or whatever represent those forces.