The World's End - Telegraph Pegg plays Gary King, a jobless, single man, aged 40, who remembers an unfinished 1990 school-leaving pub crawl in Newhaven as the high point of his happiness. Back then, he had jet-black hair and cheekbones; drove a car dubbed "The Beast"; and led a close-knit gang of mates in mild mayhem around the streets of his hometown. Today, he is reminiscing in a therapy circle-group, wearing a pair of sagging sweatpants. They greet him with trepidation and, in the case of a corporate lawyer called Andy (Nick Frost), outright hostility. Yet with a combination of lies and emotional blackmail, he manages to get them to agree to the re-run of the 1990 night out. Pegg plays Gary beautifully, with an agonisingly precise mix of bravado, provocation and utter desperation. Gary has never really grown up, a quality which both repels and attracts the other four men, who hear in his feckless, laddish prattle the seductive batsqueak of their own earlier selves. When he approaches Peter (the wonderful Eddie Marsan), who is reliably toiling away in his father's car showroom, there is a sudden awakening gleam in Peter's eyes: the thrill of the good boy to the bad. The theme touches on something both poignant and excruciating: the nostalgia of middle-age - with its leaden sense of narrowing possibilities - for youth, a time when they seemed infinite. Pegg and the director Edgar Wright, as co-writers, have got the details exactly right. It emerges that Gary is still driving "The Beast," whereupon he brandishes a mix-tape which his friend Steven (Paddy Considine) made for him at school. Steven jovially asks where he dug it out from. "It was in the tape deck!" answers Gary, as though the answer were obvious. His excess of reverence for the past hints at a hollow present. At some point in this awkward reconciliation, Gary discovers that Newhaven is populated by growing numbers of robots who, in the style of Stepford wives, have replaced real people. They're vicious, but you can yank their heads off and they leak blue paint like blood. The thwacking and bashing and knockabout lunacy that follows is an adept combination of the silly and sinister, although it does seem to drag on a bit. The truly engrossing part of the film unfurls before the first robot punch-up. The alien-invasion madness - although fully in the tradition of Wright's previous films - seems like a prolonged digression from the question that was so compelling at the start: what really becomes of Gary, and the friendships of 1990? Nonetheless, I suppose the film just does what so many old pals do at a reunion: when the conversation moves to difficult territory, turn it into a joke.