THE WORLD'S END

(Edgar Wright, 2013)

As befits the final film in the "Cornetto" trilogy, The World's End is a genre mash-up with a thematic focus on friendship and extended adolescence. Just like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, its distinctively English comic approach to genre works brilliantly throughout. But it adds a little something - it is darker, deeper, more resonant and moving.

Written by leads Simon Pegg and Nick Frost alongside director Edgar Wright, the story follows five late thirtysomething friends from the Southern English town of Newton Haven as they return home for another go at the "Golden Mile", the legendary pub crawl they last attempted as teenagers. The whole thing is the idea of Gary King (Pegg, better than he has ever been), who still dresses, talks and thinks as he did back then. He rounds up the old gang, all of them having moved on with their lives - Oliver (Martin Freeman) a slick estate agent, Peter (Eddie Marsan) a car salesman, Stephen (Paddy Considine) a building contractor and Andy (Frost) a solicitor. They are reluctant, but out of a mixture of sentimental nostalgia and pity for Gary, they agree to return. Old tensions rise to the surface during their  awkward crawl, however, before everything gets a lot weirder - Newton Haven seems to have undergone some sort of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers type of episode, and soon the five are fighting and running for their lives.

With an entire cast populated with excellent British comic actors, The World's End is strongly characterised throughout; this is crucial when the comedy subsides somewhat in the last act and the science fiction comes to the forefront. The five principals create a nice and believable group dynamic, each tension sensitively traced and nuanced, their shared memories perfectly judged in their mix of self-mythologising and rueful embarrassment. 

But this is never a drama - it is always funny. There is a level of satire here, in the portrayal of a globalised world (cleverly referenced in the climax), loads of running gags and some brilliantly witty dialogue. The climax comes down to a very Douglas Adams argument between drunken men and a logical alien, and Wright knows how to put together an impressive action sequence on a relatively modest budget. Perhaps the only real disappointment here is that his direction feels somewhat muted after the tour-de-force of Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, but his storytelling is as seamless and powerfully simple as ever.

And any minor complaints should be balanced against how much more emotional and painful this film feels than the other "Cornetto" instalments. Gary King is a great comic creation, but there is a genuine melancholy to him too, and the other four "Musketeers" bring this out with delicacy and even some universality. The ending is dark too, but it feels earned and right somehow, without ever sacrificing laughs.

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

(Peter Jackson, 2012)

There's a particular sort of shot that Peter Jackson mastered with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Its a sweeping view of an epic action sequence, the camera looping and perhaps turning too as it approaches  the heroes - generally in a group, in motion - and they move through a space, the geography of which is  established by the vertiginous action of the camera. Theres a lot of cgi involved in these shots. Cgi figures throng, and the landscape - the mines of Moria, the tunnels inside a Goblin stronghold, an ancient Elvish citadel, whatever - is generally mostly created inside a computer too.
In the first and best Lord of the Rings film, The Fellowship of the Ring, there are only a couple of these shots. Jackson was working, then, with restrictions. The film had not yet become the critical and commercial smash it eventually was. It was still a huge risk for New Line, the studio financing it. But after that, Jackson could do what he wanted, really. With success, his vision bloated and expanded. The films swelled on dvd with extra scenes and longer episodes. The Hobbit, a story which could make a good three hour film, has been cut into three episodes of over two hours each, and the result, in this opening episode, at least, is almost unbelievably tedious and mannered.
The story is set decades before the events of The Lord of the Rings and follows Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the titular hobbit with an unusual thirst for adventure, after he joins a band of dwarves on a long journey back to their ancestral lands in order to recover gold from the dragon Smaug. They are accompanied by the Wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and after an extremely slow, talky opening hour or so, encounter a series of creatures and perilous situations, including Orcs, Goblins, trolls, Wargs and Elves. This all feels thoroughly samey - reams of CGI, familiar creature design and the usual dynamics governing the set-pieces ensure that these are sequences resembling many other sequences in other such movies beyond Jackson's own.
Aside from that, it is strangely unengaging. The characters are that peculiar Tolkein mix of tweeness and pomposity, the comedy is excrutiatingly unfunny, and the pacing is so leisurely it feels almost insultingly padded out. The cast do their best with these strange collections of tics they are playing; Freeman is a winning lead, McKellen is solid and Richard Armitage is charismatic in the Viggo Mortenson role as Thorin, leader of the dwarves, but the whole thing only feels like its anything more than an exercise in stalling with the arrival in the last act of Andy Serkis (by way of CGI) as Gollum.
His scenes with Freeman in the caves beneath a mountain are by a long way the most compelling in what is otherwise a pointless, even painful, affair, so bloated and obsessed with its own mythology it feels like it represents much of what is wrong with modern blockbuster cinema.
Oh, and those swooping shots I mentioned earlier? The Hobbit is full of them. Only where they were once exciting, even thrilling, now they just feel like Jackson repeating himself, like another set of failures of the imagination in a film stuffed with failures of the imagination.