1/10

I only watched this movie because of Simon Pegg's erratic but quirky credentials from previous movies. The first movie in his Cornetto Trilogy , Shaun of The Dead (2004) is a memorable and quotable mashup of the best elements of the zombie horror genre. The next movie Hot Fuzz (2007) was a moderately entertaining but terribly overlong crime thiller (how many endings did it have?). So I watched The World's End (2013) in the hope that it would be significant part of the Pegg's output, and most importantly ... it seemed to be a Sci-Fi genre movie.

So what is this movie? ... Is it a science fiction? Is it a comedy? Is it a black comedy? Is it a horror movie? Is it part romance? Is it part social commentary?

It turns out to be none of the above and all of the above. If you take Sci-Fi, horror, comedy, drama, commentary, satire, action and romance, stuff them all in a blender, then let the resulting paste dry out in the sun, you'll finish up with something like this movie.

Simon Pegg has crammed together every stereotype character from every movie he's ever made and told them to overact to an absurd level with lots of running around, smashing , blasting and screaming. I kept waiting for the plot to settle down and stay on-track, but it just kept rambling on and on, with bits of dead-end plot threads hanging everywhere. Pegg obviously tried to script his character Gary as an even more exaggerated version of Shaun (of the dead), but the result was so over-the-top that he became a tedious and repulsive gurning cartoon character.

A large part of the movie seemed to be obvious setups for coming scenes. For example, the large metal statue of a stylised human figurine clearly featured in one earlier scene was surely going to be seen later as an animated threatening monster, and what a surprise, there it was.

Worst of all, as science fiction it was a woeful failure. The attempt at the end to explain the whole invasion as something to do with "The Network's" plan to join some sort of galactic community was all blithering nonsense. It made about as much sense as a Russell T Davies script for Dr Who.

The World's End may be one of the worst movies I've seen in decades. It's an apalling failure at every level, like a low-budget version of the mess that became Mars Attacks. I was so angry after forcing myself to sit through this movie  that I uttered the words that strike fear into the hearts of movie makers ... "I want my life back".

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