REVIEW: The World's End

The World's End (2013): Dir. Edgar Wright. Written by: Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg. Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan. Rated R (Language, robot blood). Running time: 109 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

The World’s End starts promisingly as a the-boys-are-back-together comedy, slips into sci-fi mediocrity roughly a third of the way in, and ends with a slapdash epilogue so lazy, it feels like an insult, or maybe a mistake. The film was directed by Edgar Wright and written by Wright and Simon Pegg, who previously collaborated on the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead and the (even better) tongue-in-cheek buddy cop movie Hot Fuzz. In both of those earlier films, as well as this one, Wright and Pegg meld the comedy of small town caricatures with more conventional genre-movie entertainment.

Their films also have a wry, distinctly British wit. They aren’t afraid to go for the jugular (sometimes literally, by way of decapitating a character), and for the first half hour or so, The World’s End appears willing to mine some good, uncomfortable laughs from its reunion of middle-aged blokes.

The organizer of this class reunion is Gary King (Pegg), a hyper, alcoholic mess of a guy. On a whim inspired by some mid-life crisis combo of boredom and desperation, he decides to get his old mates from high school back together for an epic pub crawl called the Golden Mile. Twelve pubs in one night, a pint (or more) in each one, is no easy feat for anyone, certainly not a group of men pushing forty. As teenagers, their first attempt at the Golden Mile left them passed out in a field somewhere between pubs nine and ten, getting sick all over themselves (which is also to say it was a smashing success).

The friends are played by a charming and accomplished group of actors that include Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan. Nick Frost, again taking up his usual sidekick role beside Pegg (though, for the first time, as the straight man), plays Andy, Gary’s former best drinking buddy turned teetotaler. An incident from his and Gary’s post-grad years has made him swear off booze (as well as his friendship with Gary), but darned if his old friend can’t drag him back out for one more night.

Andy and the rest of the guys eye the former leader of their group with a mixture of morbid fascination and deep concern. He hasn’t changed a bit. He even still drives “The Beast,” his 1989 Ford that coughs black fumes at the slightest bump in the road. For a while, they enjoy the nostalgia of being in his company, but the sadness of his situation soon sets in. Watch the worried looks Considine and Freeman exchange when they realize Gary has been jamming out to the same cassette tape since high school, some twenty years ago.

The first act of the film is rich with moments like that one, suggesting that The World’s End is heading for bold, uneasy comedic territory. Pegg’s performance walks a careful tonal tightrope. Gary is the type of eternally upbeat guy who wants you to have a blast but just ends up depressing the hell out of you because it’s painfully obvious how in denial he is.

But an earnest set-up is wasted with a hard left turn toward science fiction that, this time around, feels forced rather than inspired. A plot about extraterrestrial robots taking over the guys’ hometown has potential for satire (they also find that the once colorful characters of their favorite pubs have been homogenized as a result of corporate buy-outs, a fate that mirrors the alien takeover) but it belongs in a different movie.

The World’s End’s jarring shift of gears also allows it to duck out of dealing with the more complex and interesting issues its characters face, such as settling into middle age, dealing with alcoholism and the effects of nostalgia.

Instead there are a lot of fight scenes, which are hectic, decently choreographed, squirt blue synthetic blood all over the actors, but are nothing special, really. I find it hard to recommend The World’s End even as simple-minded fun when you can just rent 2011’s way cooler, more inventive and way better alien invasion movie Attack the Block (also produced by Big Talk Productions, the same company that produces all of Edgar Wright’s films).

Fans of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz may be satisfied enough with The World’s End but I’d be surprised if it attained anything near the cult fandom of those movies. There are enough good scenes and chuckle-worthy jokes to remind you of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s earlier successes but the movie ultimately becomes as weary as Gary King does to his friends. You wish it would dispense with the distractions, grow up and deal with something real.

- Steve Avigliano, 8/28/13

REVIEW: The Adventures of Tintin

The Adventures of Tintin (2011): Dir. Steven Spielberg. Written by: Steven Moffat and Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish, based on the comics by Hergé. Starring: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Rated PG (Swashbuckling and a boozing sea captain). Running time: 107 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

Steven Spielberg built his career on turning his boyhood fantasies into Hollywood blockbusters. When you watch the most imaginative of his big-budget adventures – Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Minority Report – you get the sense that a young Spielberg might have made the same movie had he had the technical skills and financing at his disposal the adult Spielberg does. The same is true of his buddy, George Lucas. At some gut level just they knew the stories in their heads, full of dashing heroes and journeys to exotic worlds, would make fine crowd-pleasers.

So the pairing of Mr. Spielberg and Peter Jackson, that Kiwi who had the crazy idea he could turn The Lord of the Rings into a trilogy of hit movies, makes sense. They share a mutual love of the French comic book series, The Adventures of Tintin, and set out to recreate on the big screen the rich, vibrant world they had already known for years. Mr. Spielberg would direct the first and, should it be a hit, Mr. Jackson would helm the second installment.

The Adventures of Tintin, which was filmed with motion-capture animation and released in 3D, seems to have all the right ingredients – a boy and his dog discover a clue to a mystery and embark on a globetrotting trek to solve it – but the movie fails to capture the magic that seems so effortless in other Spielberg films.

The boy is Tintin (Jamie Bell) and the clue is a cryptic piece of parchment concealed inside a model ship he bought secondhand from a street vendor. He might have known the purchase would spark trouble after a man named Ivan Sakharine (Daniel Craig) tries to buy the ship off Tintin. Sakharine needs only to utter a few words in Mr. Craig’s ominous, British drawl for us to know he’s the Bad Guy and Tintin wisely keeps the ship for himself, sensing an opportunity for adventure.

And how right he is! Before he knows it, Sakharine kidnaps him and he is onboard a real ship where he meets a drunken sea captain, Haddock (Andy Serkis). Haddock and Sakharine have a longstanding feud that is apparently news to Haddock; their ancestors were rival pirates and Sakharine’s relative cursed Haddock’s after the latter robbed him of his gold. Or something.

The plot details in these sorts of movies are more-or-less irrelevant as long the story takes our heroes from Land A to Land B and back again, which The Adventures of Tintin does. As it turns out, the parchment features as series of cryptic symbols along the bottom that can only be understood when read with two other notes, also hidden inside model ships. So we begin in Europe, where the first two ships are, then hop over to Morocco where the third is. The intervening trip involves travel by boat, plane and motorcycle and there is no shortage of dazzling animated action sequences.

So where does Tintin go wrong? To be honest, I’m at a bit of a loss to say but let’s start with the animation, which, on a surface level, is stunning. How an animator is able to recreate the look of a rainy street or the sun glistening off ocean waves in such a way that looks somehow better than the real thing, I’ll never know. The movie also looks great in 3D; the animation is crisp and sharp, and the added effect of the 3D is seamless.

But the inhabitants of this digital world have an odd quality about them. Because the actual physical performances of actors are being used through motion-capture, the characters of Tintin move like real people. Yet they remain cartoonish; they have big heads, exaggerated features and curvy, rubbery bodies. The strangeness of this look is especially noticeable in the film’s comedy, which is mostly broad and slapstick. The antics of a pair of bumbling coppers (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) are limited by the use of real actors. They appear to be cartoon characters but because their bodies have none of the elasticity of say, Wild E. Coyote when he steps off a cliff, their movements appear curiously stiff.

This creepy middle ground between animated people and the real thing kept the movie at a distance for me. A scene such as a motorcycle chase through a Moroccan town, shown in one long take, is breathtaking but also not as exciting as it should be. There is too much of a sense that these are pixels being cleverly manipulated to look like buildings, boats and boy who ducks and dives between them. The movie is visually impressive but only superficially so.

The failings of The Adventures of Tintin are not so great as to shake my faith in Mr. Spielberg’s talent, but the movie does make me realize how much I take for granted the action movies of his that do work. My inner child is always eager to escape into a movie and who knows, maybe Tintin’s next adventure will allow him to do so.

- Steve Avigliano, 01/02/12