When Gary King was nineteen he and four friends; Peter, Oliver, Steven and Andy, attempted an epic twelve pub crawl through their home town of Newton Haven; they didn't make it but it was still the best night of Gary's life. Now, twenty odd years later he decides to get his friends together and complete the crawl. They aren't too keen as they have all got on with their lives but eventually he talks them round and they return to their old home town. Not surprisingly it has changed somewhat; the pubs are now near-identical; part of a homogenised chain
there is something else odd; something they can't quite put their fingers on. In the second pub they are joined by Oliver's sister Sam; who Gary manages to offend. They continue their crawl until the four pub when everything is turned upside down
Gary gets in a fight in the toilet and is more than a little shocked to find his opponent is a robot! It soon emerges that most of the town have been replaced and if Gary and his friends aren't to be next they will have to be careful
and that means completing the crawl!
This is a decent conclusion to the 'Cornetto Trilogy' which I suspect will improve on future watchings although obviously the surprise involving the robots won't be a surprise. Early on it was hard to like protagonist Gary as he come across as a manipulative loser who refuses to grow up, as we learn more about him he becomes more tragic and thus a little bit more sympathetic. Simon Pegg does a fine job in the role. The rest of the cast are good too; as well as Pegg's regular sidekick Nick Frost there are several familiar faces; most notably Paddy Constantine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsden and Rosamund Pike who play the central characters; there is also a fun cameo from Pierce Brosnan as their old teacher who is now one of the alien robots. There are plenty of well-choreographed fights and the moment the first robot's head comes off was a genuine surprise as there had been no previous hints.
The film nicely captures the feeling of returning to somewhere you haven't been in years where you aren't sure if the place has changed or you have or both. The way the town's people had been replaced was reminiscent of 'The Stepford Wives' only here almost everybody had been replaced by 'better' versions. There are also obvious links to the previous 'Cornetto' films as our protagonists find themselves up against vast numbers of threatening characters in what appears to be the sort of typical English town that should be too boring to feature in an action movie. As I watched I couldn't help thinking that the odds of all twelve pubs still being open twenty years on was almost as unlikely as everybody being taken over by robots perhaps that is why they stayed open as pubs up and down the country closed! Overall an entertaining enough film.
This is a decent conclusion to the 'Cornetto Trilogy' which I suspect will improve on future watchings although obviously the surprise involving the robots won't be a surprise. Early on it was hard to like protagonist Gary as he come across as a manipulative loser who refuses to grow up, as we learn more about him he becomes more tragic and thus a little bit more sympathetic. Simon Pegg does a fine job in the role. The rest of the cast are good too; as well as Pegg's regular sidekick Nick Frost there are several familiar faces; most notably Paddy Constantine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsden and Rosamund Pike who play the central characters; there is also a fun cameo from Pierce Brosnan as their old teacher who is now one of the alien robots. There are plenty of well-choreographed fights and the moment the first robot's head comes off was a genuine surprise as there had been no previous hints.
The film nicely captures the feeling of returning to somewhere you haven't been in years where you aren't sure if the place has changed or you have or both. The way the town's people had been replaced was reminiscent of 'The Stepford Wives' only here almost everybody had been replaced by 'better' versions. There are also obvious links to the previous 'Cornetto' films as our protagonists find themselves up against vast numbers of threatening characters in what appears to be the sort of typical English town that should be too boring to feature in an action movie. As I watched I couldn't help thinking that the odds of all twelve pubs still being open twenty years on was almost as unlikely as everybody being taken over by robots perhaps that is why they stayed open as pubs up and down the country closed! Overall an entertaining enough film.