The World's End

Making a good parody film is an art form. It’s not enough to just copy certain genre pictures scene-for-scene, throw in some crude jokes, and call it a movie. For every Airplane! or Naked Gun, there are many such spoofs that do this badly and fail. The best parodies not only send up a certain genre, but also work on their own as solid films, offering actual plot and characters, and funny and entertaining even to viewers who’ve never seen a movie in the genre they’re targeting. The great Mel Brooks understood this in his heyday, and the team of Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright understand it now.

But Pegg and Wright go above and beyond just making a good comedy. Shaun of the Dead wasn’t only a very funny zombie spoof, but actually a solid zombie picture in itself (one whose ending I found far more believable than so much “serious” zombie fare). Their buddy cop action spoof Hot Fuzz was…well, definitely more on the side of satire, but the murder mystery that drove the narrative could have plausibly worked if done straight.

With The World’s End, the third entry in a loose trilogy with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Wright and Pegg set their sights on paranoid science fiction thrillers. I’m not sure if it would have worked as well if they played it straight, and if they did it would have at least seemed very unoriginal. But as comedy, it’s gold.

The film opens with a montage recounting five teenage school mates partaking in their small town’s famous pub crawl, with the twelfth and final pub being the eponymous The World’s End. They don’t quite finish. 20 years later, four of them (Eddie Marsan, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, and Nick Frost) have moved away and onto bigger and better things. But ringleader Gary (Pegg), a mega-slacker still living in his teen years, hasn’t forgotten the crawl, and convinces the old gang to reluctantly return home and attempt it once more. But during the crawl, weird happenings gradually reveal that the town’s been taken over in an alien conspiracy à la Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Yet, in spite of the terrifying happenings around them, they continue on the crawl.

One reason the spoofs from this creative team have been a cut above is that they don’t just make us laugh in just the basic ways, with only written and spoken jokes (though there are still plenty of those). They employ the aesthetic and filmmaking techniques in very humorous ways, too. For example, this and the aforementioned films employ stylized kinetic editing, but for sequences that are so inane and unstylish that it’s funny to see them presented this way. In Shaun of the Dead, the technique was used for a toilet flushing. In The World’s End, it’s used to show pints of beer filling in each pub the heroes attend, but gets brought to a screeching halt for the glass of water ordered by the one responsible character. Subtle, but funny, especially when you recognize this trademark after seeing their other movies. Another example in this one would be the fighting between the humans and the sort-of-robots, which are expertly choreographed mixes of hilarious slapstick and surprisingly good hand-to-hand technique.

But the robots don’t show up for a least a half hour. Until then, the strength of the picture lies in the rapid back-and-forth between the five main actors. A lot of credit is due to Pegg, whose character is so hopelessly immature and backward that in a more serious film, he’d crossed the line from lovable loser to detestable degenerate. The character would be pathetic if he weren’t so funny, and still might be even though he keeps us laughing. But it’s not just Pegg; the other four play off him, and each other, quite well. So well that I think I missed quite a few lines in between laughing fits. And the robots coming into play doesn’t put an end to this repartee, but injects a new undercurrent of energy into it. In fact, some of the dialogue with the robot copies of locals (including the second ex-James Bond to appear in this trilogy) are even funnier than the blue gore slapstick that happens most of the time.

When the big sci-fi conspiracy is explained, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (I’m still not sure what exactly the plan for the town entailed), and the resultant conclusion is a little ridiculous. But then, that seems to be the point: to mock the inherent dopiness and pious grandiosity of so much post-apocalyptic fiction. I much preferred this intentional ridiculousness to the sentimental direction the movie seemed to be taking as things wrapped up, and it’s a solid, funny stamp on the best comedy of the year.