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.

ATTACK THE BLOCK

(Joe Cornish, 2011)

Attack the Block creates its own biggest problem in the opening scene, then spends long stretches of the remainder of the film attempting to overcome that problem. In that scene, a young nurse is returning home at night to a South East London tower block, when she is mugged at knifepoint by five youths. This mugging is quite gritty and realistic, even frightening in its sudden inevitability and implied violence. Then the youths are revealed - once an alien has literally crashed into all their lives - as the films chief protagonists, and the audience is left with a strange little dilemma. In some films, it isn't necessary to sympathise with the characters. The right kind of drama works whether or not there is empathy between viewer and onscreen figure: other elements can carry a film, and an unsympathetic hero can even be a virtue if handled correctly. But a genre film like Attack the Block is partly reliant on audience identification. Without it and our instinctive need for the heroes to survive and prevail, there is no suspense, no tension, and the film malfunctions at the most basic narrative level.
Cornish seems to understand this and so his film does its damnedest to humanise and explain the actions of its youthful heroes over the next hour. The mugging is even confronted directly when they are forced into an alliance with their victim and her righteous accusatory anger demands some sort of explanation. That this is never satisfactorily given is down to the nature of the film. This is a sci-fi thriller which owes a big debt to the early work of John Carpenter (it begins with a shot of an object falling from the stars towards earth ala Carpenter's The Thing or John McTiernan's Predator), meaning it moves quickly, aiming for tautness and narrative economy. The few baggier passages are the comic scenes - mainly involving Luke Treadaway's middle class drug dealer - which leaves little room for character development. Cornish gives his ghetto heroes a few slightly political bits of dialogue - they wonder if the government created the aliens to "kill black boys" just like they did with drugs, and one wonders why the Mugging victims boyfriend does charity work with children in Ghana instead of in London - but generally they are too busy fleeing and fighting to become fully realised figures, despite a Quick montage of their home lives. In a film about young minority lower class youth written and directed by a Middle Class White forty something media professional, I found that quite problemmatic.
But that's not what Attack the Block is really about. Really it's about genre thrills, and it delivers those efficiently, on it's modest scale, with a few exciting and scary sequences. It utilises its tower block location with imagination and wit, rattles along for the most part, has some solid laughs amidst the gore, and feels quite original in its high concept mix of sci-fi, horror, comedy, gang drama and action film. It also contains a nice Basement Jaxx score, which Cornish uses well.
He shows real promise here, and his future career could be interesting. I just hope he avoids the ghetto tourism next time...