The World's End (R)
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Caution: spoilers.

This is the third and final entry in the "Cornetto trilogy". It came out in 2013, but I didn't see it until 2025. It just might be my favorite entry in the trilogy, though all the films are excellent. (I may need to re-watch "Shaun of the Dead" sometime and consider raising my rating of that film, because right now it's a fair bit lower than my ratings of this and "Hot Fuzz", which doesn't seem right.) Certainly all the films are hilarious, but I feel like this one might be the most hilarious of the three.

It starts with Gary King (Simon Pegg) narrating a story about the best night of his life, which happened in 1990, after he and his four friends graduated high school. They went on a pub crawl of the "Golden Mile" in their hometown of Newton Haven, which includes 12 pubs, the last of which is called "The World's End". Unfortunately, they failed to complete the crawl, and in the present, Gary wants to reunite his friends and try again. None of them are eager to do so, nor do any of them seem particularly happy to see Gary after all these years. But for whatever reason, they all ultimately agree to return to Newton Haven with him. His former best friend, Andy (Nick Frost), is the most reluctant to do so, for a reason that will eventually be revealed by the film, though I won't spoil that. Also, he no longer drinks, and always orders water in each of the pubs they visit, much to Gary's dismay. The other three friends are Steven, Peter, and Oliver (Martin Freeman). The five of them also run into Oliver's sister, Sam (Rosamund Pike), who apparently Gary once had sex with when they were teenagers, and with whom Steven is in love, though he's never told her that.

Anyway... it takes quite awhile for the sci-fi aspect of the film to reveal itself. But there's still quite a bit of the film left, once it does. In the fourth pub, Gary gets into a fight with a teenager in the rest room, eventually unintentionally knocking the guy's head off. It turns out he was an android. When Gary's friends come to the rest room to confront him after discovering he'd lied about something important, the teen's friends (who are also androids) also show up, and get in a fight with Gary and his friends. I must say, the androids seemed like skilled fighters, but they were surprisingly easy to break. I mean, relatively easy; Gary and the others still had a bit of a hard time dealing with them. But it could have been much worse. After the fight, they begin to wonder if everyone in town has been replaced by androids (which they start calling "Blanks"). To avoid raising suspicion, Gary insists they carry on with their pub crawl.

And beyond that, I don't want to spoil any more details. I will say the movie wasn't exactly how I imagined it would be. I knew it would be about an alien invasion, but the nature of the invasion was different from what I assumed it would be, and I'm not altogether certain it was a bad thing. Humanity probably would have been worse off if it had never happened, let alone what happens when it's ultimately thwarted. (Though the way it's thwarted is amusing; the way the aliens come to feel about Gary is basically the way Andy feels about him, minus the friendship that lies beneath the exasperation.) I'll also say there's one thing about the ending that I feel didn't make a great deal of sense, but it was still cool, in a way. Anyway, the characters were all pretty decently written and acted. Gary had the biggest personality. He seemed both witty and witless, charming and annoying. The kind of character that's only really likable in a fictional story; in real life he would have been insufferable. Mostly that's because he's just never grown up, he still acts like he's 18, or something. But he's still at least a somewhat sympathetic character, because his life hasn't turned out at all like he hoped it would. And... I don't really know what else to say. It's all just terribly clever and amusing and endearing.

Oh yeah, and I want to mention that "WTF" can stand for "Working Title Films", which produced this movie. That's not what the abbreviation stands for in the film, but I have to wonder if it's a coincidence or not, that the abbreviation appears in some of the movie's comedy.