The final scoop in the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy has been a long time coming, especially for die hard fans of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright, who promised a fitting conclusion to a story that began almost a decade ago (doesn’t that make you feel old?). The boys certainly delivered, going out with a bang and wasting little time in diving into the heart of the action. Madcap action sequences and recurrences of running trilogy jokes were expected, but it was the character development that really impressed. The World’s End is more a story about identity as it is about mind-controlling robots from outer space.

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Pegg and Frost were joined by a stellar supporting cast, almost all of whom have appeared in Shaun of the Dead and/or Hot Fuzz, providing a fun game of ‘spot that actor’ for viewers, but Pegg’s turn as the self-absorbed, arrogant alcoholic Gary King was particularly interesting. Darker than the likes of Shaun Riley or Nick Angel, he’s often hard to like, but perhaps not to relate to. It’s refreshing to see Pegg sidestepping the hero for once; instead, it’s really Nick Frost and Paddy Considine who take up that mantle as his long suffering school chums.

 

Although Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End all stand apart as singular examples of the crème of the British comedy crop, together they are simply superb. The growth of Wright as a filmmaker and both Pegg and Frost as actors and writers over the past ten years is evident, yet The World’s End manages to retain the charm of its predecessors and remains a very British apocalypse film. For fans, it’s cinematic closure. For everyone, it’s just bloody good fun.

 

4 Stars

Hannah Woodhead