Edgar Wright’s The World’s End opens with a man in his forties rehearsing a pub crawl in his bathroom mirror, and it ends with the end of the world. Both halves are the same joke, and the film knows it.
Released in the UK on 19 July 2013 and in the US on 23 August, The World’s End is the third and final film in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, following Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007). Wright directed and co-wrote with Simon Pegg. It runs 109 minutes. It is a comedy, an action film and a science fiction film, and it refuses to sort those into an order.
The premise is small and the stakes become total. Five friends return to their hometown of Newton Haven to finish a pub crawl they started as teenagers in 1990 and never completed. The Golden Mile covers 12 pubs. The last one is called The World’s End. They do not reach it the first time. They are not the same people the second time.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures UK.
Gary King and the Golden Mile
Gary King is the engine and the problem. Pegg plays him as an alcoholic who has not aged out of 1990 so much as calcified inside it. He invites Oliver Chamberlain, Peter Page, Steven Prince and Andrew Knightley to finish the crawl. They are all 40. Gary is 40 in the way a stopped clock is right.
He lies to get them there. He tells Andrew his mother has died. Andrew agrees to come.
Nick Frost plays Andrew Knightley as a teetotaller, and the film gives him a reason. In 1997 he was in a drunk driving accident while taking Gary to the hospital after Gary suffered a drug overdose. That is the history between them. It is not a gag.
The casting is deep and specific. Paddy Considine is Steven Prince. Martin Freeman is Oliver Chamberlain. Eddie Marsan is Peter Page. Rosamund Pike is Sam Chamberlain, Oliver’s sister, who Gary and Steven fought over in school. Pierce Brosnan is Guy Shepherd, their old school teacher. David Bradley is Basil, a local conspiracy theorist. Michael Smiley is Reverend Green. Darren Boyd is Shane Hawkins. Steve Oram is a motorcycle policeman. Reece Shearsmith is a collaborator.
The Blanks in Newton Haven
In the fourth pub, the others tell Gary he needs to grow up. He goes to the toilet angry. He gets into a fight with a teenager and knocks his head off. The teenager is an android.
The film turns here. Gary’s friends fight off several more androids. They work out that androids have taken over the town. They call them Blanks.
Gary’s response is the best idea in the screenplay. He urges the group to keep drinking. Continuing the pub crawl is how they avoid suspicion. The apocalypse becomes a scheduling problem.
Sam shows up again. She, Gary and Steven fight Blank versions of her childhood friends, known as the twins. Sam tags along after that. Basil, who has not yet been replaced, tells Steven the Blanks are trying to build a galactic conglomerate. Any human who refuses will be replaced with an identical Blank.
The Blanks then try to convince the humans to surrender. The group finds out that Oliver and Mr. Shepherd have already been replaced. They fight a bar full of Blanks. Gary lets Sam escape Newton Haven. Pete is captured after attacking the Blank that has replaced his childhood bully.
A Pub Crawl as Science Fiction
Wright wrote a screenplay called Crawl in 1995 about teenagers on a pub crawl. He decided it worked better as a comedic look at young adulthood and aging, and reworked it with Pegg in the early 2010s. That decision is the whole film. The World’s End is not about teenagers. It is about what is left of them.
The film is considered a social science fiction film, and the label holds. The Blanks are not invaders in the usual sense. They are a franchise. They want to standardize a town, replace what is individual, and move on. Newton Haven is not conquered. It is renovated.
The stunts were coordinated by members of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team. That shows in the bar fight, which is staged as comedy and lands as action. Bodies go through windows. Heads come off. The choreography is legible, which is more than most films of this size manage.
Production ran from 28 September 2012 to that December. Relativity Media, Big Talk Productions and Working Title Films produced it. Filming locations included Elstree Studios, Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City. The tagline is “Good food. Fine ales. Total annihilation.”
What the Cast Does With It
Pegg and Frost built this trilogy on a specific dynamic, and The World’s End inverts it. In Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Frost was the anchor and Pegg was the man learning to grow up. Here Pegg is the man who refuses, and Frost is the one holding the line.
Frost plays Andrew’s sobriety as a wound, not a virtue. He is the only person in the group who has actually changed, and the film treats that as strength. When he finally fights, it is not a punchline.
Pegg’s Gary is harder to like and better for it. He is a liar and a drunk who ruins a friend’s memory of his own mother to get a night out. The film never asks you to forgive that. It asks you to notice that he is also the only one who sees what Newton Haven has become and refuses to accept it quietly.
Considine, Freeman and Marsan each get a distinct register. Freeman plays Oliver as a man who has optimized himself into something hollow, which pays off when the film reveals he has been replaced. Marsan’s Peter is the quiet one with the oldest grievance. Considine’s Steven still wants to win a fight that ended decades ago.
Pike’s Sam is the one character who did leave and come back, and the film uses her sparingly. She is not a prize. She is a witness.
The Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy Ends Here
The trilogy has a shape. Shaun of the Dead was about a man who could not see what was in front of him until it ate his neighbors. Hot Fuzz was about a man who trusted systems until the system turned out to be the crime. The World’s End is about a man who cannot let go of a night that never finished.
That progression is deliberate, and it makes the third film the saddest of the three. The first two are about learning something. The third is about whether learning anything is possible at 40.
The film won Best British Film at the 19th Empire Awards. It premiered at Leicester Square in London on 10 July 2013. Universal Pictures released it in the UK, Focus Features in the US.
The Verdict on The World’s End
The World’s End is the weakest of the three Cornetto films and still better than most comedies released in its decade. That is not a contradiction. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are close to perfect. The World’s End is messy, overlong in its middle stretch, and unsure whether it wants to be a tragedy with jokes or a comedy with a body count.
What it gets right, it gets very right. The central idea — that a man’s refusal to grow up becomes, briefly, the thing that saves the species — is a real argument, not a premise. The Blanks want compliance. Gary King cannot comply. The film does not pretend this makes him good. It makes him useful.
The ending is the part worth arguing about. The group’s refusal to surrender their humanity is treated as a victory, and the film does not soften it into a happy one. Newton Haven is gone. What replaces it is not shown as better.
That is the honest note. The World’s End does not tell you that nostalgia is a trap and then let its hero off. It tells you the trap is the only thing he has, and then it lets him walk into it with his friends.
The Numbers
- Title: The World’s End (2013)
- Director: Edgar Wright
- Writers: Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright
- Runtime: 109 minutes
- UK release: 19 July 2013 (Universal Pictures)
- US release: 23 August 2013 (Focus Features)
- Premiere: Leicester Square, London, 10 July 2013
- Principal photography: 28 September 2012 to December 2012
- Score: 8.1/10 (Metacritic 81/100)
- Award: Best British Film, 19th Empire Awards
Who Plays Whom
- Pegg takes the role of Gary King
- Frost is Andrew Knightley
- Considine appears as Steven Prince
- Freeman plays Oliver Chamberlain
- Marsan is Peter Page
- Pike takes Sam Chamberlain
- Bradley is Basil
- Brosnan plays Guy Shepherd
- Smiley appears as Reverend Green
- Boyd is Shane Hawkins
- Oram plays the Motorcycle Policeman
- Shearsmith is the Collaborator
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