The World’s End

Ah, the lure of the sequel. Director Edgar Wright and writer/star Simon Pegg had a big success with Shaun Of the Dead and another with Hot Fuzz. So, I imagine them saying, why not make it a trilogy? Let’s round up some of the old gang and do it again.

Which is what they did. They recruited Nick Frost and Martin Freeman from the earlier films and added the likes of Eddie Marsan, David Bradley and Paddy Considine.

The result is the World’s End and – the almost inevitable accompaniment to sequels – the appearance of the law of diminishing returns. To be fair, this is not a true sequel; the story and characters are different from the previous movies but, like them, it’s a zany, idiosyncratic and off-the-wall comedy.

The trouble is it doesn’t really work. Laugh? I thought I’d never start and, in truth, I never did.

Gary King (Pegg) is an alcoholic loser, pushing 40 and eager to recapture the happiest night of his life when, soon after leaving school, he and his mates just failed to complete the Golden Mile, a 12-stop pub crawl in their home town of Newton Haven.

He hasn’t seen those mates – Frost, Freeman and company – for years but somehow he talks them into giving the Golden Mile one more shot and therein lies my first problem.

I simply couldn’t believe that these apparently intelligent, reasonably successful, middleaged men would fall in with any idea proposed by the garrulous and frankly irritating Gary.

But they do and in fact their adventure begins on a nicely satirical note pointing up the dreary sameness of current small-town Britain where all the pubs and high streets are pretty well identical. That idea alone, however, is not enough to carry a film and soon we drift into a sort of pastiche of Invasion Of the Body Snatchers.

The inhabitants of Newton Haven, some of them apparently familiar from school days to Gary and company, are cold, standoffish, even threatening, and they bleed blue. Indeed, they bleed an awful lot of blue because, as the men stagger from pub to pub, whenever comic invention flags – which is often – we have yet another bar room brawl.

Who are these people? Where do they come from? And what do they hope to achieve? With the help of Pierce Brosnan, making a cameo appearance for reasons best known to himself, we do find out but by then the film has made a crunching gear-change and is into a positively apocalyptic third act in which the earlier wildness becomes wilder still.

No doubt there is some kind of message in all this, other than an agreeable dislike of conformity and homogeneity that Wright and Pegg have expressed in previous films, but if so it passed me by.

Pity, because Wright, Pegg and indeed the whole cast, are very talented people but they can be a lot better, and indeed funnier, than they are here. Maybe the pitcher has gone once too often to the well.