2013 - IN REVIEW: BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT

THE WORLD’S END

My biggest disappointment of 2013 happens to be a film that appears to have been universally acclaimed by everyone but me, and that is Edgar Wright’s latest film “The World’s End”.  What ultimately made this film my biggest disappointment of the year was that previous to seeing “The World’s End”, I had been a massive fan of everything Edgar Wright had made.  “Spaced” was a gem of a little show, while both “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” were excellent take-offs of their respective genres, and the Simon Pegg / Nick Frost-less “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” certainly exceeded expectations.  His re-uniting with Pegg and Frost to finish their “Cornetto Trilogy” was cause for celebration in my eyes, so it is obvious that the thought that I may dislike the film never entered my mind.  Sadly this is exactly what happened.  For some reason I just did not connect with “The World’s End” at all.  The fact that I absolutely hated the last half an hour of the film aside, early on I just could not enjoy the film because I hated Simon Pegg’s selfish and arrogant character.  I have a real problem with selfish characters in films (this is my issue, I know, not the film’s) and Pegg’s Gary King is a man who is obsessed with the past back when he was popular as a kid, and has never grown from that; he is stuck in the past and acts if the world has not changed around him.  He annoyed me from the initial frame of the film and I couldn’t get over it.  I think my problem with the film is the screenplay from Pegg and Wright because directorally Wright has his fingerprints all over “The World’s End” and I love his style.  I just was not on board with the story this time, but thinking retrospectively I should have anticipated this could have happened.  First of all, I am a non-drinker so the thought of a pub crawl bores the hell out of me, and while “Shaun” and “Fuzz” were examinations of the horror and action genres, “The World’s End” is more of a sci-fi film, which has never been a favourite genre of mine.  While I enjoyed the performances of Nick Frost, Paddy Considine and Martin Freeman, I never found myself enjoying the film as a whole, but I found myself hating the deplorable final half an hour of it.  It is in these moments that I believe that Wright just loses hold of his story and it becomes totally ridiculous.  By the time the credits started rolling I could not believe how much I disliked what I had just witnessed which was sadly to become my biggest disappointment of 2013.