“Ever have one of those nights that starts out like any other but ends up being the best night of your life?”
With Christmas only a few weeks’ away, it’s not rare to see pubs at this time of year packed with revellers embarking on annual 12 pubs of Christmas pub crawls all over the country.
Only a few years’ ago, the premise of a group of mates going on a pub crawl involving that exact amount of pubs formed the basis for The World’s End, a comedy from the same team that brought you the brilliant Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.
Along with those two movies, in fact, it forms part of the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy from Edgar Wright (director), Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and company and what more could you ask for in a finale than an epic pub crawl with an alien invasion to boot
In The World’s End, the chief protagonist, Gary King (Pegg), an alcoholic, reunites his old school gang (Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine and Peter Page) with the aim of completing ‘The Golden Mile’, a 12-pub pub crawl in their hometown of Newton Haven.
The gang had taken on The Golden Mile when they were teenagers, but fell short before the final pub on the route, The World’s End.
The longer the pub crawl goes on, the more Gary and his friends realise that they are in the middle of an alien invasion, which doesn’t deter him from repeating his failures as a teenager this time around.
As the Godfather Part III and others have demonstrated down the years, it can be difficult to maintain quality in a trilogy through to the very end, but The World’s End certainly pulls it off.
The Guardian said of The World’s End that it “saved the richest bite until last”, while 89% on Rotten Tomatoes is a good score in anyone’s book.
If you haven’t yet seen it, or even if you have and your memory needs refreshing, check it out on RTÉ 2 tonight at 9pm.
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