Man, Last Night Was Apocalyptic!: “The World’s End”

A group of grown-up, respectable friends who have drifted apart are reunited by their very much not grown-up, not-respectable ringmaster to relive an epic pub crawl which marked the high point of their misspent youth. Also, the world ends.

I loved “Shaun of the Dead” (haven’t yet seen “Hot Fuzz,” although I want to) so I was super-excited for this new movie from the same director/writer?/acting team of Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg. I can tell you for sure that you should go see it if the premise interests you even a little. I didn’t love it as much as Victor did–it gets preachy, although it’s preaching stuff I basically agree with–but it is heartfelt, very funny, and smart.

It has some things in common with “Shaun.” There’s a very blunt critique of decadent late capitalism, which I am always down for. This movie has a much darker take on friendship than “Shaun,” so it makes a nice grim little contrast.

There are a ton of sharp touches. I love that the names of every single pub on the crawl do actually relate to the events which take place there! I was hoping that would happen and it totally did. There are references throughout the movie to a mysterious accident which caused one of the old wrecking crew to quit drinking, and although I basically guessed right about what had happened, the reveal still startled me because it was so well-timed. And the lines about “selective memory” sound like they were written by someone who has dealt with (or been) a certain kind of catastrophically unreliable, bella-menzogna friend.

I would happily have watched several more hours of this, I can tell you that.