Six years after Hot Fuzz and nine years after Shaun of the Dead comes this past summer’s final installment in Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s “Three Flavours Cornetto” trilogy, named for the ice cream that shows up in each movie. The World’s End lives up to it’s title; it’s the final stop on an epic pub crawl that Gary (Pegg) and his four pals failed to complete 20 years ago but are attempting to finish tonight. And it’s the likely result of an invasion of alien robots that the hard-drinking middle-aged pals stumble across during their boozy journey.
Of course, the film is a reunion for the actors (particularly Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Bill Nighy, Rafe Spall, Julia Deakin, and Patricia Franklin, each of whom appears in all three movies), but also for the fans who made the first two movies cult favorites around the world. Under director Wright’s all-seeing eye, in-jokes abound, but so do rueful recognitions of time past, dreams unfulfilled, and friends neglected. The robot plot is plenty funny and scary on its own, but the notion that Gary or any one of his friends might have been replaced by a lookalike automaton is also a pretty apt summation of what it’s like to feel you’ve grown old and complacent.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIndrLtJgms]