Drunk and disorderly
In The World’s End people lose their heads, but the ale never does
In 2004, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost turned the horror film on its head with Shaun of the Dead, a comedy that supposed a zombie invasion ran smack into the pub-happy indolence of lower-class Britain and no one could tell the difference. Now (skipping over the lukewarm police comedy Hot Fuzz) they have made The World’s End, which is essentially Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a couple of pints under its belt. People lose their heads in this movie, but the ale never does.
It’s an improbable combination that is very funny and shamelessly alcoholic, and evokes — somewhere in the slurred collapse of its characters — a fond nostalgia for the good old days, i.e. the times when you became hopelessly drunk in traditional, authentic pubs rather than hopelessly drunk in pubs that were designed by big corporations to look traditional and authentic. The hangovers, it’s worth noting, remain fierce.
Pegg plays Gary King, a middleaged mess whose life’s dream (“we want to get loaded and we want to have a good time”) is juvenile, incorrect and irresistible. In 1990, he and four friends started a pub-crawl through the small town of Newton Haven, trying to have a pint at all 12 establishments. They never quite made it to the last one, The World’s End, and now Gary wants to reunite his buddies — all of whom have grown into jobs, families and a healthy aversion to Gary King — to try it again. This time, he vows, they’ll get to the bitter end, or perhaps the lager end.
The friends, who can’t resist Gary’s dissipated enthusiasm, are Steven (Paddy Considine), Oliver (Martin Freeman), Peter (Eddie Marsan) and most of all Andy (Frost), the hardest to persuade. For one thing, he’s now teetotal. Andy: “I haven’t had a drink for 16 years.” Gary: “You must be thirsty then.”
They go off in a hail of one-liners and mordant tavern humour. “You remember the Friday nights. I remember the Monday mornings,” Andy says, but Gary — a scruffy barfly with a long black coat and a talent for speechifying — gathers the “five musketeers” in a cloud of reminiscence that’s all optimism.
However, from the time they hit the opening bar, The First Post, something seems wrong. The places look too carefully corporate, the innkeepers seem too distant (although not so distant that Gary isn’t thrown out of The Famous Cock, having been banned for life 20 years ago) and the old friends seem too young. They run into quite a few of them, notably Sam (Rosamund Pike), Oliver’s sister, with whom Gary had drunken sex in the disabled toilet stall in 1990, a consummation he now believes he can resume where he left off. At one melancholy point he muses, “We’ll always have the disableds, won’t we?” like Bogart in Casablanca except with draft beer and the pasty complexion only a diet of crisps can bring on.
The World’s End becomes wearying — after a while it’s like being the only sober person at a party of heavy drinkers — but about 40 minutes in, it gets new life, or perhaps death. It becomes a comic horror story about a looming apocalypse, and one running gag is that Gary is nevertheless firm in his goal of having a pint in all 12 pubs. He’s heading to The World’s End even if the world is, too.
It’s also a journey to the past, a place that can’t be recaptured, although it can conceivably be redrunk. The World’s End gets juice from the fact that, to Gary — and, with each passing pint, to his friends — the thirsts remain the same. There’s a working man’s sensibility to the film, and among the amusingly gruesome special effects, director Edgar Wright, who also made the previous films, finds the core of humour of the British middle class. It’s a place of bad food, plentiful beer, pungent asides (“What the f--- does WTF mean?”) and proud collapse.
“We’re more belligerent, more stubborn and more ignorant than you can possibly imagine,” says one of the characters in a speech meant as a rallying cry for humanity. Cheers, mate. You going to finish that?