Under normal circumstances, a film like The World’s End would be miles outside my bailiwick. It’s been years since I could stomach flocks about man-children stalled in permanent adolescence (e.g., half the comedies starring SNL vets). I’m not interested in celebrations of the magical bonding power of alcohol (e.g., half the comedies released in the last five years). I’ve seen maybe one R-rated comedy in the last five years (Tropic Thunder had its good parts). Combine the three elements and I would anticipate the kind of mess least likely to earn a dime of my own money. Only on the strength of the talented names of Simon Pegg and director/co-writer Edgar Wright did I temporarily waive my reservations and see if the minds behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz came within a stone’s throw of the same achievement levels in wit and ingenuity.

As in those flicks, Pegg is once again center stage as the merry party animal Gary King, an aging misfit whose life’s greatest achievement was a failed pub crawl twenty years past, and who’s desperate to recapture his glory days, or what seemed like glory at the time, by calling do-over and giving it one more try — drinking in twelve hometown pubs in a single night without passing out, dying, or rethinking his life. Still wearing the same Sisters of Mercy shirt that was his non-conformist uniform back in the day, Gary lets his scatterbrain state ping-pong him from one snarky rejoinder to the next except when he’s in pursuit of his quest, for which his laser-focused clarity is obsessive and sad. Imagine if Captain Jack Sparrow switched from rum to Red Bull, and you’ll have some idea of Pegg’s manic embodiment of an embarrassing midlife crisis lived out at super-speed.

Naturally a twelve-pub crawl can’t be performed alone, unless you’re reenacting your favorite scenes from The Lost Weekend, which would net you more of an Oscar grab than a big-screen Britcom. To keep him company and pay the tabs, Gary reunites his former best friends for one more hurrah at his side. Little does he know or care that his erstwhile sidekicks — Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, and Eddie Marsan — have matured into four interchangeable sticks-in-the-mud whose lives could be happier, but who aren’t pursuing self-destruction or regression as an alternative. Despite their level-headed recalcitrance, a bit of leverage and chicanery is all Gary needs to reassemble the old gang against their better judgment. The binge is afoot.

Even before nightfall it’s already evident that all their old hometown haunts appear sterilized and standardized, the same old crowds and bartenders now stiffer and creepier than Gary remembers. Blamed at first on rampant corporate “Starbuckization” that infects many a town great or small, the facade falters and turns sinister when the depths of the transformation reveal themselves in an homage to any small-town-with-a-dark-secret story you’d care to name in a sci-fi vein. Suddenly the pursuit of happiness isn’t just a wacky guys-night-out mission; it’s their only hope of surviving till dawn. If the drinks don’t kill them, the townspeople just might.

As a rare specimen who’s happier now than he was between ages 18 and 21, I can’t say the movie struck too deeply a chord. I’m not yet feeling compelled to retreat to those times, though I can glimpse the occasional hint in peers who might identify with Gary’s purposelessness, his embrace of the wastrel’s way, and the darkness he reveals in the final act that drove him into this harebrained scheme. There but for the grace of God, and all that. (Hopefully I’m not speaking too soon and due for my turn at age fifty. Someone needs to club me should that come to pass.)

On the other hand, I could get behind Gary’s nostalgia as personified by the film’s soundtrack. Movie music rarely jolts me (I’m alone in my age group as someone who doesn’t swoon at ’80s top-40 staples), but it was impossible to miss the common thread in various old tracks from the Soup Dragons, the Charlatans UK, Happy Mondays, the Sundays, Pulp, and more. For a few minutes I could nearly envision young Gary and young, nerdy me sitting on a couch circa 1992 watching MTV’s 120 Minutes, rapt in the tunes and lost in Dave Kendall’s accent. So that rang a bell for me, even though I would’ve bolted for the door as soon as he brought out the beer.

Though Pegg is somewhat the showboat at times, his de facto support group each have their chances to win the film, even when events force them to throw caution to the wind and overdo the suds alongside their self-appointed leader. Freeman remains a must-see here as in all things, and Frost in particular — as the staunchest teetotaler of the clique — clearly deserved a break from the buffoonery of his roles in Shaun and Fuzz. Later in the crawl, Rosamund Pike joins the team as Freeman’s sister and lends a little more dignity to the group when their blood alcohol levels start compromising their judgment. Among the wacky cameos throughout, one of the most fun and least spoiler-y nails the role of the town gadfly charged with explaining the secret backstory to Our Heroes. After recent appearances in the likes of Broadchurch and Game of Thrones, David Bradley — the Potterverse’s former Mr. Filch — is once again an excellently crotchety old man, and at this rate is in danger of becoming more overexposed than Benedict Cumberbatch.

To be honest, though, as the frenetic shenanigans culminated in a showdown with the Powers That Be, I was disappointed to watch the Moral of the Story keep digressing, staggering around as if from virtual inebriation. We began with what appeared to be heading toward Stalled Adolescent Learns a Lesson About Growing Up at Last, detoured for Best Friends Stick Together 4-Ever, but ended the journey with All You Need is Free Will. Essentially, Gary and his playboys take their last stand in defense of humanity’s “rights” to petulance, belligerence, failure, and all the liquor they can metabolize. Not that I’m anti-free-will, but on a certain level I found myself sympathizing with the Big Bad. There’s a through-line if you drill deeply enough for it, but it resolves with Gary the lush being right about everything.

As I expected, World‘s latter half was dominated by hyperkinetic man-on-alien brawling, where Wright excels on a slightly better budget than he likely had for Shaun or Fuzz, though not quite the tens of millions that were thrown at him for the amazing colossal Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Despite the obvious upgrades in visuals and stuntwork at a fraction of the cost, I find myself preferring Shaun‘s slacker-vs.-zombie parallels, Fuzz‘s skewering parody/homage of all the worst big-budget buddy-cop films, and Scott Pilgrim‘s everything in general.

I can’t say I regretted tagging along for The World’s End to see Pegg, Frost, and Wright cap off their sort-of trilogy with fair portions of zaniness and aplomb, but it ultimately reminded me why I rarely hang around foul-mouthed, seedy crowds, no matter how much we meant to each other when we were young.

To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: no, there’s no scene after The World’s End‘s end credits, but feel free to hang around for a complete play-through of an old Sisters of Mercy track called “This Corrosion”. If you can’t have a drink with Gary, I’d wager sitting still for one last tune from his favorite mixtape would be a far better thing.