THE WORLD'S END

Few comedies are awaited with as much fervor as those of Edgar Wright who, along with frequent star and co-writer Simon Pegg seem to be vying for the title of "patron saint of Nerddom." While Wright's films, particularly those of the Cornetto Trilogy, are draped in nostalgia and genre thrills, they are unique in modern geekdom in that they don't rest on nostalgia so much as they serve as complex, enjoyably conflicted, frequently hilarious meditations on it.

It's hard growing up, particularly if you've been putting it off for a few decades. Such is the predicament of Gary King (Pegg), the rude, drunken and earnestly desperate protagonist of The World's End, the third and possibly best entry of the trilogy. For King, life never measurably improved on a drunken pub crawl he attempted with his friends when they were all 17.

Twenty-three years later King is suddenly eager to get the band back together and recreate that crawl, which he dubs "The Golden Mile:" 12 pints at all 12 of the pubs in their hometown of Newton Heaven, finishing at the titular World's End. But his friends (played by Wright regulars: Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine and Eddie Marsan) aren't so eager to join him. Unlike King, who lives his life in a shabby flat doing God-only-knows between AA meetings, they've all settled down and joined society. But one by one they're lured back by King's oily charm and the promise of days gone by.

But recapturing their glory days proves difficult, everything seems just out of reach and they can't settle in like they used to. The town feels slightly off, particularly the all important pubs which have lost their individual flair after a series of corporate take-overs: "Starbucking," they call it. There's a nice, quintessentially Wrightian touch, where every time they enter a new bar, the camera repeats the exact same establishing shot in what is clearly the same set with different extras. This persistent offness launches the gang into existential crisis mode. It's as if the world is against them cutting loose. Of course, this being a Cornetto film, the assertion is soon proven true when we learn that the town's increasing plainness is actually the result of a stealth takeover by space robots. 

This film might be the most confident of the series. We get no winking shots of flying saucers or anything to telegraph the genre shift a la Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. As much fun as that was in the previous installments, it's for the best that we don't get it here, as the importance of the pre-shift movie almost dominates the post-shift one. The film takes a lot of time setting up King and the gang to the point that we might all be perfectly content if the film remained Wright's version of The Big Chill. But the shift into Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory works because it all clicks thematically in fun and surprising ways. It's no accident that a film exploring the links between nostalgia and conformity selects automatons as its antagonists.

The film's visions of what conformity means is interesting in that Wright and Pegg don't automatically discount the Starbucked life the robots are offering. Like in Hot Fuzz, it seems as if nostalgia and conformity are linked in Wright's mind. King may prod and tease his friends for working for 'The Man' and living flavorless lives, but it seems like they have more options than King. He may have succeeded in staying away from societal norms, but his freedom and his refusal to let go of his youth has put him in damaging routines that he isn't even aware of. The film sympathizes with his desire to be the ultimate individual while observing that the quest has made him a friendless slave to drugs and alcohol. Ultimately, it seems that King knows he's a fuck-up, but he wants the freedom to be a fuck-up, even if that's not exactly freedom and has disastrous consequences for everyone around him. That's a pretty tough conundrum for a comedy to present but Wright handles it about as deftly as one can handle such a messy worldview. In a dark, telling echo of Shaun of the Dead, the gang doesn't just have to fight robots, but King, who's insistence that they finish the Golden Mile and get to The World's End starts to seem more self-serving and suicidal by the minute.

That multifaceted view of King and his situation is what makes the film so good, and that lens is also turned on King's "friends" who all have their own outlooks on their youth and how the town has changed. Nick Frost does a fantastic job playing against type as the mature one of the group and there's a scene where Eddie Marsan encounters a former bully that's touching to say the least. It is a pity that we don't get the same kind of detail with the character played by the wonderful Rosamund Pike, who is saddled with being "the girl." Pegg and Wright have consistently shown an eagerness to be emotionally honest and mature with the film's they make together, so they owe it to themselves to stop underwriting their female parts.

Still, World's End is fantastic. Wright and Pegg have capped off an already excellent series with their most thoughtful entry without ever losing their sense of humor. The film might be about alcoholism, lost innocence and self-destruction, but it's also a really funny movie about alcoholism, lost innocence and self-destruction. Also the robots are a blast. In a year filled with dumb sci-fi (Elysium, Man of Steel) and moronic looking comedies (does anyone actually want to see The Family?), it's exciting to see a film like this, take on these issues so successfully and emerge as a great ode to the joys and pitfalls of getting loaded.

Grade: A

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JACK REACHER

For bad films, writing the review can become a bit of an endurance test. For example, right now I'm wondering how many effective words can be written about a film as dull and hollow as Jack Reacher, the new paint-by-numbers thriller starring Tom Cruse and directed by Christopher McQuarrie (Way of the Gun) before I give up out of boredom. 60 words aren't really enough, so I'll go on.

In Pittsburgh a sniper guns down five innocent bystanders. In the aftermath cops arive on the scene, collect evidence and soon arrest mentally unstable Iraq veteran James Barr (Josheph Sikora). Faced with a mountain of evidence Barr tells the overzealous D.A. (Richard Jankins) to simply find Jack Reacher.

Reacher is a retired MP. He's one of those Man-With-No-Name types. He lives off the grid. No address, no phone number, no Twitter. You don't find him unless he finds you, or he magically appears to save the film 20 minutes. Soon Reacher starts to suspect that Barr might have been framed and goes about proving it by beating up people, stealing a series of progressively nicer muscle cars and being just witty enough to not seem like a total asshole. Rinse. Repeat.

When brutal, yet strangely dull violence doesn't work, he enlists the help of Barr's defense attorney Helen (Rosamund Pike) who happens to be the D.A.'s daughter (a conflict of interest if ever I saw one) and the great Robert Duvall as "Elderly Gun Nut" eventually exposing a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, yet has some of the lowest stakes imaginable. When the Master Plan is finally explained, it doesn't escalate tension so much as it lets all the air out of its balloon.

Cruise is adequate, but clearly on autopilot, as is pretty much everyone else, but it's especially disappointing to see Cruse phone it in as it's his go-for-broke gusto that usually makes him such a great screen presence. The only one who seems to be enjoying his part is Werner Herzog (Director of Aguiree: The Wrath Of God, and Grizzly Man) who has been inexplicably cast as the main villain, a man who's name translates to the delightfully existential "Human Prisoner," and insists that a henchmen proves his loyalty by chewing off his own fingers. Given Herzog's dark eccentricities, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he threw out the script and wrote all of his scenes himself. I wish he had done the same for the entire film.

McQuarrie and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Right Stuff, Being There) shoot the film competently. Everything looks good and there's a great deal of technical skill on display in the action scenes. It's refreshing to see someone direct fight scenes so that that the camera is the proper distance from the proceedings and not shaking as if the operator is struggling to support the camera's weight. I really wish more action films looked like Reacher. But McQuarries direction, no matter how skilled, cant make this film interesting. You'll either predict every twist or you'll be too bored to care.

After 513 words there's not much more to say about Jack Reacher. It want's to be a gritty 70's style thriller, but its attempts to provoke the audience (the shooting, a montage showing us all the lives of the victims) feel half heated and lack and real conviction and we're left with this nothing of a film. Last year, Tom Cruse effectively relaunched his carrier with Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, a fun, effective action distraction from the December Oscar bait. This year, he's made Jack Reacher, which just succeeds at being a big, wet noodle of a film.

Grade: C

BONDATHON: DIE ANOTHER DAY

In 2002, the Bond franchise celebrated it's 40th anniversary with its 20th film, Die Another Day. The film isn't terribly well remembered, in fact it's considered a low point of the franchise that almost destroyed 007 forever. This hate fly's in the face of the fact that it got not terrible reviews and made a boat load of money, begging the question, is Die Another Day really that bad?

The short answer is no. The film is not good. Not good by any means, but it's hardly as unwatchable as say The Man With The Golden Gun and as much as it tries, and good Lord it does try, it's not nearly as outrageous as Moonraker.

Before descending completely into camp, we have an admirably hardcore opening where Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is captured and spends the next fourteen months being tortured in a North Korean prison camp. The torture continues through the opening credits meaning Bond's ultimate punishment is having to listen to Madonna's awful title track. Eventually Bond is traded back only to face suspicion from M (Judi Dench) over what Bond did or did not divulge during his internment. M strips Bond of his Double O status and detains him for further questioning. Backed against the wall, Bond has no choice but to break out and go rogue to clear his name.

Up till here everything is fine. The action is heightened, but not out of line with series norms. Brosnan is a bit hammy when playing dark, but generally okay. The film has adequately set the stage for a darker, more personal adventure. Unfortunately that's not what it delivers and things take a turn around the 50 minute mark as the film decides that it wants to be a goofy, sci-fi cartoon and never looks back.

On the one hand I admire separating the dark and whimsical elements of the franchise into separate segments as they have never played well together. On the other hand the series has never been good at whimsy so having the entire second half of the film be all whimsy turns out to be a pretty fatal move.

Some of it works. The ice palace fortress of super-villain/Richard Branson analogue Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens) is a tremendously silly idea, but a visually striking one none the less. Also, I liked that when the bad guys capture Bond late in the film, they figure out that they have to take his laser watch too. Also Halley Barry is fun as Bond's NSA agent sidekick Jinx. Jinx is another one of those female James Bonds from foreign agencies. She has her own gadgets, her own car, and like Bond she can only speak in groan inducing double entendres.

But then there is nearly every other element of the film. For every moment that works, there are entire sequences that fall flat. Let's start with the villain. I wanted to like Graves. He's partially based on everyone's favorite billionaire Richard Branson and partially on Ian Fleming's version of Moonraker baddie Hugo Drax, a character who certainly didn't get his due in the official adaptation and doesn't do much better here.

Take his villainy. In addition to having a derivative super weapon (another laser satellite) Graves also has a terribly unimaginative plan to (spoiler alert) destroy the mine field separating North and South Korea so that the North can invade. This brings up some important questions, 1) Why is he using a super-laser with more destructive power than an atomic bomb to clear a mine field when he can just destroy Seoul, forcing the South to surrender? 2) Are there any satellites in this universe that don't double as giant lasers, and if not, why doesn't the world just outlaw satellites? (end spoiler alert)

That laser leads to the films most infamous scene where Graves, who is controlling the weapon via a robot suit, has the laser chase Bond so that he must kite surf down a melting glacier. Until now the only reason the franchise has sort of gotten away with nutty ideas like this is that we've gotten to see talented stunt men pulling them off. This film robs us of even that pleasure by executing the scene with terrible CGI, with close-ups of Brosnan serving as the only photographic element. It's not that CGI can't produce nail-bitters (just look at the fantastic set-pieces that Pixar has done over the years), but you have to convince the audience that there is a real person in real danger. Even a wacky, cartoon universe should be able to ground it's audience somewhat.

Ultimately though, Die isn't interested in grounding us. It just piles on gimmick after shallow gimmick. DNA treatment centers, dancing lasers and the aforementioned robot suit. Heck, the most plausible element in the film is Bond's invisible car! Yeah, that invisible car that uses tiny camera's to project images onto the other side is actually, theoretically sound. Still, it doesn't matter because watching 007 slowly sneak around Graves's lair in a 4,000lb invisible Aston Martin is one of the most laughable images in the entire film.

The film's laughability isn't helped by the stylistic flourishes imposed by director Lee Tamahori (XXX: State of the Union). The man seems obsessed with step-printing and mock fast motion that hit at seemingly random moments and fly in the face of the formalism that the rest of the film is shot with and just help underline that these films had gone right back to being cartoon parodies of themselves. In a way, this is the cinematic equivalent of a mid-life crisis, artificially big, gaudy and over the top, the film keeps trying to convince us how young this franchise is and fools no one.

Grade: C-

Enjoy these other Bondathon entries:

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball / Never Say Never Again

You Only Live Twice
On Her Majesty's Secret Service 
Diamonds Are Forever
Live and Let Die
The Man With The Golden Gun 
The Spy Who Loved Me 
Moonraker
For Your Eyes Only
Octopussy  
A View To A Kill
The Living Daylights
Licence To Kill
Goldeneye
Tomorrow Never Dies
The World is Not Enough
Die Another Day
Casino Royale
Quantum of Solace
Skyfall