Review: The World’s End

FILM

 

THE WORLD’S END

Cert 12a | By Alex Dymoke 

Three Stars

 

MORRISON’S car parks, Kit Kats, national rail services from Leicester to Coventry – it’s easy to hate the banal rubbishness of small-town Britain. But as a spate of offbeat British comedies have shown, it’s easy to love it too. Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead and, more recently, Sightseers conjure a world so sweetly and unassumingly British that you can’t help but be endeared to it. There’s comfort to be found in the perspex frontage of a bus shelter, a poignancy in buying crap stationary from a dour WHSmith employee. Our lion hearts pump drizzle through our veins, and I, for one, am totally fine with that.

 

Such is the appeal of The World’s End. Newton Haven is a medium sized market town with one supermarket, one bus garage and twelve pubs. 

 

These drab watering holes are the stop-offs on a marathon pub crawl referred to by locals as the “Golden Mile”. Former Newtonians Andrew, Steven, Oliver, Peter and Gary had a legendary night on the mile as teenagers but have all since grown into responsible middle-aged men. All, that is, except for Gary, who has been trapped in an eternal adolescence since leaving school. Determined to relive the youth he never really stopped living, he invents a bereavement to draw his friends back from their post-A level diaspora. 

 

Like most school reunions, it’s funny and sad, even if the laughs dry up towards the end.  

 

A satisfying conclusion to Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s small-town disaster trilogy.