World's End

In a garden city suburb to London, a zigzag hike between 12 pubs forms a course called "The Golden Mile." Five middle-aged men meet on an October weekend with the intent of completing "the Golden Mile" by having a pint in each tavern, ending in the titular "World's End" public house. Along the way, the buddies discover that suburb is a "penetration point" for technocratic aliens who have systematically replaced the residents of the village with regiments of robots. The robots are equipped with LEGO-swivel necks and joints that come apart readily in hand-to-hand combat, spraying bright blue fluid all over the landscape and they are lethally murderous when ordered to hunt down the human interlopers in their city. "World's End" is the third of three parodies directed by the Englishman, Edgar Wright, and starring the gifted British comedian, Simon Pegg -- the other offerings in the trilogy are "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz". "World's End" is cleverly written and reasonably entertaining. The film is effectively acted and, surprisingly, poignant -- an important aspect of the movie is a lament for a lost youth that the rather hapless blokes are attempting to recapture in their epic pub crawl. The characters are engaging and the general conceit sufficiently interesting to, perhaps, not require the increasingly frantic, and tedious, combat and special effects that comprise the second half of the picture. The movie would have been better without the hordes of dead-eyed, artificially young and handsome simulacrams chasing the heroes, monsters that were better, and more frightening, in their parent film(s), the two versions of "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers." But, without the apocalyptic narrative, the movie could not have been financed and some of the bar-fights with the robot army are undeniably exciting, and so, there's no point in wishing for a film that was not made. As it is, the plausible dialogue and moments of drama, generally melancholy at the inexorable ravages that time makes in the most fierce of the "party-hearty" lads, are gifts to the audience in the midst of all the smash-em-up mayhem. And only a British film would climax with something like a rowdy debate in the House of Commons in which the surviving heroes argue for human disorderliness and anarchy in the face of a world that is increasingly ordered by franchise restaurants, political correctness, and the tyranny of the smart phone. "Shaun of the Dead" is better and "World's End" closely resembles its predecessor, even reprising a rather dizzying reversal in the movie's "Mad Max"-style coda, but this last film in the trilogy, with its rather obvious allegory (maturity and habit make robots of its all), is more emotionally effective -- something is at stake in this movie that was not wagered in the earlier films in the series.