10 Insane Movies Way Deeper Than They Look

On the face of it, the third and final entry into Edgar Wright's esteemed Cornetto Trilogy is a breezy, ridiculous sci-fi comedy in which a group of middle-aged men have their pub crawl interrupted by an inconvenient alien invasion.

Except, The World's End actually ends up being about much more than that, and that's likely why so many view it as inferior to the more crowd-pleasing - and undeniably brilliant - Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

Though much of the film's drama centers around Gary King (Simon Pegg) and his four pals accepting that they've drifted apart, it's really a literally sobering look at the destructive, hopeless power of alcoholism.

While it's made clear from early on that Gary is a directionless 40-year-old man desperate to recapture the glory of his youth, we only learn the full extent of his troubles at film's end, that he has little purpose beyond his next pint, and he's unhappy enough that he recently tried to take his own life.

After all, it's no coincidence that Gary's quest involves downing 12 pints over the course of an evening, there also being 12 steps in the addiction recovery program.

It's not the sunniest subject matter for a film marketed as a broader comedy on the level of the other Cornetto movies, but it does lend the film a crushing, unexpected emotional weight, with Gary's struggle played quite superbly by Pegg.

In fact, in recent years Pegg confirmed that Gary's arc was informed by his own struggles with alcoholism earlier in his career:

"I felt like I was kind of telling people with that movie... Because that's what addiction is like. It's like you have grown a second head and all it wants to do is destroy itself, and it puts that ahead of everything else - your marriage, children, your job."