The World's End

The 90% fresh rating for “The World’s End” on Rotten Tomatoes mystifies me.
The final installment in director Edgar Wright’s Cornetto trilogy (“Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz”) is one of those comedies in which the lead character rattles off page after page of rat-a-tat dialogue, about one-tenth of which makes you chuckle. Mostly, it’s wearying.

Simon Pegg stars as Gary King, an overgrown adolescent who hits on the idea of re-creating a pub crawl he and his mates from the sleepy village of Newton Haven never finished in their youth. (His approach to alcohol is not twelve-step but twelve-stop.) Their final destination is, of course, The World’s End. Wright re-teams Pegg with Nick Frost and has procured the services of some creditable actors in Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, and Rosamund Pike, but the comic chemistry never pops. And the movie falls completely apart with the introduction of a sci-fi subplot involving the takeover of Earth by replicants composed of blue ink and grafted skin. This material is D.O.A. and takes forever – forever – to play out.