Ordinarily, a dozen pints of beer makes for a recipe of forgetting. For five estranged childhood friends, however, a twelve-bar pub-crawl known as the Golden Mile serves as a quest to recapture past glories.

Twenty years since their first and only attempt on the eve of high school graduation, the eponymous final leg of the crawl, The World’s End, remains untapped, a fact for which Gary (Simon Pegg) finds occasion to “get the band back together.” Gary hasn’t changed since high school, though age has warped his arthurian fervor into something more quixotically unhinged, while the others have all grown up and found conventional success and stability. These disparate worlds collide when Gary hunts down his school time pals one by one, inciting them to join him in his pints quest, each scene culminating with a variation on the same reluctant, affirmative sigh. The sequence is one part of many delightfully constructed parts, with fast and clever dialogue being the order of the day.

Unfortunately, the film’s narrative loses focus and struggles to move forward. Writer-director Edgar Wright’s kinetic and deftly compositional directorial style makes most of scenes that would otherwise die standing, specifically those set in tight, enclosed spaces that fail to give us any visual sense of progression (an early joke makes light of this, and it’s funny because it’s true, but it’s also not funny because it’s true). Central to the film’s narrative troubles is a dearth of characters worth caring about. Pegg is a fixed point in a cast that is grossly mishandled for all the talent they bring to the table, the grievance lying with a script that demands so little of them except for the odd, stilted narrative thrust.

The World’s End pivots on a genre convention that deserves to go unspoiled but should be noted is so thinly developed that when things that are not as they seem reveal their true, insidious nature, we are left with just too many blanks.

amaenche@mavs.coloradomesa.edu