Ellington

Satire or spoof? That is the question that nagged at me during the wretchedly long pub crawl through beer-drenched taverns in "The World's End," the final film in Edgar Wright's trilogy of comedies that began with "Shaun of the Dead" (2004) and evolved into "Hot Fuzz" (2007). This last installment crashes and burns with apocalyptic fury.

Like Wright's earlier films, this comedy is about a loquacious loser whose life centers on the pub. In group therapy, Gary King (Simon Pegg) shares that the best moment in his forgettable life was a night of drunken debauchery on the day he and his four BFFs graduated from school and officially embarked on a journey into manhood. The kicker is that Gary and his mates failed to make it to the last bar on the list back in 1990.

While Gary's friends have made something of their lives, Gary is mounted and pinned like a barfly to that single night of failed ambition. He still squirms in his tedious little adolescent life, wearing Doc Martens, a black trench and a Sisters of Mercy T-shirt.

Like J. Alfred Prufrock in T.S. Eliot's poem, Gary's "full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; at times, indeed, almost ridiculous—almost, at times, the Fool."

Armed with a glib tongue and an arsenal of lies ("Mum's dead"), Gary invites his old buddies for a weekend reunion. He first reels in Peter (Eddie Marsan), a car salesman at the family dealership. Then he lures in Oliver (Martin Freeman), a high-end real-estate agent, Steven (Paddy Considine), a successful construction company owner and, finally, Andrew (Nick Frost), a curmudgeonly corporate lawyer. In the old jalopy of their spendthrift youth, the five "Musketeers" head for their hometown of Newton Haven, where they pledge to complete the Golden Mile, swilling pints of beer at each of the pubs.

What happens in Newton Haven changes the world. That's about as much as I'm going to tell you. Otherwise, you might not get the full shock-and-awe effect of the film's mad descent into alien invasion and world destruction.

Before THE END came up on the screen, this film reminded me of Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh," a four-hour play I saw in Chicago years ago. It's a difficult play. "The World's End" is a difficult film. Everything in the pubs reeks of abandoned hope as Gary maintains his "pipe dream," and his friends try to ground him in reality.

There isn't a bad performance in the film. The most notable is from Pegg. His eyes hold such wisdom and sadness, and his verbal outburst such pain that he makes the role almost tender—despite the foul language spewing from his mouth. Frost, as Andrew, has a more virtuoso role. He has reformed his ways, gotten up on the wagon and found peace. The other guys round out the interpersonal dynamics.

At its best, "The World's End," which was written by Pegg and Wright, provides insight into the lonesome loser, compares the past and present, and condemns the impersonal mechanization of modernization. It doesn't wallow in cheap sentimentality; instead, it gets drunk on alien invasions and empty-headed robots.

Gary and his friends bash, wrestle and tear apart scores of alien robots on the path to fulfillment. The cinematic variations for killing alien robots exhausted me. Arms rip. Heads twist off. Blue ink spurts out. Pierce Brosnan pontificates. The film twirls through genres. It's eclectic and strange and weird and patently ridiculous.

If you have stamina to make it to the end, this film will leave you with two indelible impressions: beers and 'bots. I had a hangover by THE END.