Simon Pegg’s Gary King is a performance and a character that deserves to be studied. Like Frozen‘s Elsa, Gary is a character whose success depends on a very, very careful balance. But where Elsa is sympathetic throughout Frozen, Gary spends a sizable portion of The World’s End demonstrating that he is frequently an awful friend and often an outright lousy person. He is a selfish, self-centered, cruel, deluded ruin of a man. It is a testament to the strength of their friendship that Gary’s best mate Andy (Nick Frost) does not shoot him when they reunite at the start of the picture. Over the course of his life, Gary has managed to hurt, alienate and otherwise damage himself and every one of his friends. Pegg plays him as a very specific refinement of the manchild character that has been popular in comedy of late; a hedonistic jerk who is not so much a perpetual child as a perpetual teenager; a man convinced that not only he is the single greatest person to ever walk the earth, but that everyone else is somehow lacking.
A poor performance or a bad script could have condemned Gary King to the loathsome tier of awful, hateful protagonists who drag their entire movie down with them. Fortunately, Simon Pegg is a great actor, and he and his writing partner/director Edgar Wright know what they are doing. Gary’s awful behavior is based in his sickness; he’s an alcoholic who has come close to the bottom but hasn’t quite hit it. He’s tried to get help, but has not had the moment of clarity he needs to break alcohol’s stranglehold on his life, and so rebounds to his self-destructive behavior to either try and forget his pain or end his life.
One day he rounds up his high school mates (Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, and Eddie Marsan), who have not seen him for years and cannot quite believe the sway he still holds over them, and attempts his hometown’s legendary pub crawl, “The Golden Mile.” He and his friends attempted the crawl once before, and while they did not make it to the end, it is the high point of Gary’s life. In re-attempting the pub crawl, Gary hopes to either recapture the happiness he felt on the first attempt or kill himself. Unfortunately for Gary, his mates and his self-destructive tendencies, his hometown has been taken over by a sinister alien intelligence and its army of blue-blooded, human-replacing drones. What was supposed to have been a pub crawl turns into a fight for survival. That fight for survival leads Gary to the moment of clarity he needs, which allows him to save himself and humanity, but not without great cost. And the realization of that cost leads to The World’s End‘s most emotional moment.
After several massive battles with the drones (dubbed “Blanks” by Considine’s Steven and run with by the rest of the group), losing two friends to the Blanks and airing some old grievances with Andy, Steven and Marsan’s Peter, Gary finally makes it to the last pub, the titular World’s End.” Andy, the only friend to keep up with him, prevents him from drinking his twelfth and last pint. The two fight, and Gary begs Andy to let him finish the crawl because it is the only thing he has left. His life went steadily downhill from the first attempt, and Gary faces being middle-aged a lonely, broken, suicidal alcoholic. Gary has fallen so far and so hard that, as he puts it “I don’t want to be sober!” He lies to himself that his life is perfect, and that achieving perfection is in fact possible. He is terrified of actually living the life he has, and so retreats further and further into alcoholism.
The fight with Andy, who refuses to leave him despite all the pain Gary has caused him and who refuses to allow his best friend to fall any further serves as the first part of Gary’s moment of clarity. The second part comes from a confrontation with the Network, the alien intelligence that has infiltrated humanity in an attempt to civilize it. The Network offers to make Gary into a Blank, taking his best memories and putting them in a new version of his young body that will go about life without any of the pain and disappointment Gary has fought with in his adult life. Gary, by way of decapitating his younger self, refuses. He would rather live in the world as a screw-up than retreat into the idealized, challenge and change-free life of a Blank. The fight with Andy and the Network’s temptation give Gary the clarity he needs to break his alcoholism. He subsequently convinces the Network to abandon its plan to “civilize” humanity by arguing that his species may be screwed up, but they have the right to be screwed up and to make their own way towards a better future, rather than be forced into it.
The Network, begrudgingly convinced by Gary, Andy and a returned Steven’s drunk but sound argument, abandons Earth. In an act of spite, it unleashes a worldwide EMP before it goes. The blast incinerates Gary’s hometown, although he and his surviving friends are able to escape to the outskirts of town. Gary and Andy sit on the same spot where they ended their teenaged attempt at the Golden Mile, watch the apocalypse and Gary says two words that show how far he’s come.
“I’m sorry.”
Gary is at last taking on the responsibility for himself that he had previously shirked. The man who Andy earlier noted could never be wrong thanks to his self-centeredness apologizes for all of the wrongs he has done and all the pain he has dealt, especially to his best friend. Gary cannot magically repair the damage he’s done to himself, his friends and the world, but he can face it and move forward. It’s a powerful character moment from Pegg and Wright, who have made a career out of blending character-based comedy with the film genres they grew up on and some potent dramatic work. Gary’s hillside apology as the world burns from the last spite of the Network (in its own way as childish and twisted as Gary was at the picture’s start) is their finest hour as collaborators so far.