After a disappointing shot at an Anime type teenage love story, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The director Edgar Wright and his actor buddies Simon Pegg and Nick Frost try to return to form with a science fiction comedy. The World's End is a step up from Scott Pilgrim but not a real high step.
The film is about a bunch of aging high school buddies bar hopping through a small town. They just happen to stumble onto a space alien invasion of robots. This film borrows from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Invaders from Mars and The Earth Dies Screaming. The film also borrows some dialog from Roger Corman's The Wild Angels. All this nerd hipster stuff gets a little tiresome but I have to admit a lot of this film is pretty funny. Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are funny guys and the fights with the robots are well done.
Unfortunately there is an attempt to add some profound meaning to this film. You have to sit through a lot of tiresome stuff about friendship, male bonding and growing up. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost actually do a decent job with these scenes but it seems like a lot of heavy crap to add to a film that is essentially a goofy comedy. The dramatic elements are really trite and I've seen it all before in many other television shows and movies.
The uneven mix of all these genres might indicate that Edgar Wright is struggling with what type of film he wants to make in the future. I wonder how many more of these genre rehash films he can keep spitting out? It's starting to look like Wright's television series Spaced, which was very funny but had interesting characters which mixed with the funny situations could be his career highlight.
109 minutes, written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright.
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